Each year Galter Library staff have the opportunity to attend conferences, bringing back a wealth of knowledge and fresh perspectives to enhance our services. The Research Assessment and Communications department recently attended a few conferences and have insights they’d like to share.

Josh Elder, Digital Scholarship Library Assistant

Symplectic Elements North America User Group 

Josh Elder, our Digital Scholarship Library Assistant, attended a user group meeting for universities in North America that use Symplectic Elements, which is branded for Feinberg School of Medicine as Northwestern Elements. Josh learned from other universities common reasons that Elements isn’t used to its full potential, such as faculty needing support in understanding the publication tracking features, super users needing additional training, and because of the complexities around how the Elements tracks publications through automatic claiming. Josh also learned about a feature that we don’t currently offer called the Open Access Compliance Monitor and he explored ways that the feature could benefit Feinberg School of Medicine.

Medical Library Association 

Karen Gutzman, Head of Research Assessment and Communications

Karen Gutzman, Head of Research Assessment and Communications attended the Medical Library Association’s four-day annual conference that brings together medical librarians from across the globe. This year’s conference theme was “Stronger Together” and was held in Portland, OR. She attended sessions on building “transformative agreements” which allow universities to pay publishers for article processing fees incurred by their authors for fully open access and hybrid journals – a great example of this is Northwestern’s agreement with the Wiley and Hindawi publishers. She also learned about building partnerships between librarians and researchers to support data management and sharing from librarians at Ruth Lilly Medical Library at the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis, Indiana, Lamar Soutter Library, University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School and NYU Health Sciences Library. Finally, she enjoyed the interview from the keynote speaker, Dr. Safiya U. Noble, the David O. Sears Presidential Endowed Chair of Social Sciences and Professor of Gender Studies, African American Studies, and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).  Dr. Nobel’s focused on the topic of her latest book, Algorithms of Oppression, regarding data discrimination, the monopoly of a few Internet search engines and obvious bias in search algorithms.

Bibliometric and Research Impact Community (BRIC) 

Christina Gattone, Research Impact Librarian

Christina Gattone, Research Impact Librarian, attended the Bibliometric and Research Impact Community (BRIC) conference in Vancouver, Canada. A three-day event at Simon Fraser University, it featured a pre-conference day with presentations from organizations like Clarivate and OurResearch and two days of talks and poster presentations from scholars and librarians not just from North America but Asia, South America, and Europe as well. These enlightened Christina to the current goings-on in bibliometrics and how colleagues are determining research impact at institutions around the world as well as providing practical information about major vendors’ services and products that can be applied to everyday work with researchers across Feinberg School of Medicine. Christina is excited about integrating OpenAlex into her work and presenting it to researchers; as it is (currently) a completely open tool, it might be especially valuable to those without access to expensive subscription-based tools.

These events allow our librarians to bring back fresh perspectives to enhance our resources and services, improve user experiences, and benefit our library community.