About the Conference

The Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis again hosted its biennial Beyond the Numbers (BTN) conference from November 6 – 8, 2023. On an annual basis, this event “brings together experts to share their experiences at the frontier of economic data and information, discuss problems and potential solutions, and identify ways to improve access to and understanding of economic information” (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, n.d.-a). Many of the attendees are librarians, often with liaison roles or specializations related to economics and business from public and academic libraries. There is also a healthy mix of non-library professionals such as analysts in corporate organizations to research staff working with economic researchers in government agencies.

The three days of programming began with a half day on the Federal Reserve’s digital badge initiative (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, n.d.-b) and an evening welcoming reception at the Economy Museum.

Photo:

An evening reception at the Economy Museum kicked-off the event. Attendees connected with new faces and reconnected with colleagues. A few lucky raffle winners walked away with Federal Reserve branded mugs and hoodies. @ HD McKay, 2023

Photo credit: HD McKay

Day two offered a packed schedule that opened with keynote speaker Governor Christopher Waller, member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. He gave an accessible talk on using economic data to understand the economy (Waller, 2023). This was followed by dual stream concurrent sessions in the morning and afternoons, broken up by a set of lightening talks right after lunch, before concluding with a plenary session. Day 3 was a lighter half day session that began with a second Keynote on a ‘Data producer’s perspective’ from Arthur Johannes Giesberts, a Development Economist at the World Bank (Giesberts, 2023). He provided insightful background on how the World Bank data is collected across countries and some of the nuanced considerations to keep in mind when interpreting the data based on its collection. The remainder of the morning included a concurrent session, a plenary session about the public documents available through the Fed Reserve System before concluding with another set of lightening rounds and closing remarks from the organizers. The full schedule and copies of slides, are available on the BTN Conference 2023 webpage (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, n.d.-c).

Session Highlights

A good sign of a quality conference is that there are more sessions you want to go to than the schedule allows; and this was certainly the case at Beyond The Numbers. Among the many great sessions here are just a few that offered particularly timely and practical takeaways:

Building a Desirable Repository: Meeting the Call of Researchers, Funders, FAIRness, and the OSTP Presented by Sarah Swanz of Washington University, St. Louis.

Sarah shared lessons learned from their organization’s transition from a Bepress collection to a standalone data repository called WashU Research Data (Swanz, 2023). Her talk set the context with a well-structured and concise overview of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology (OSTP) memo and the challenges and opportunities it presents to data librarians. Her content rich slides provide excellent summary of both high-level requirements of a ‘desirable and fair’ data repository, and organizational infrastructure that is required for successful implementation. The presentation and deck are an excellently practical reference for anyone thinking about bolstering research data support at their institution.

Knowing NAPCS, the North American PRODUCT Classification System: Its Origin, Structure, Uses, and Limitations Presented by Jennifer Boettcher of Georgetown University.

As one of the most enticing titles for a business librarian’s soul, this session delivered on its promise. How many times do we find ourselves looking for more granular data at the product level in research consultations? Using a specific example (wines), Jennifer contextualized the new code within pre-exiting classifications (e.g., NAICS) and census data products (e.g., Economic census) (Boettcher, 2023). It is still early days for NAPCS implementation, but the session’s ‘takeaways’ slide offers good tips on how to start leveraging NAPCS through the data.census.gov platform.

Propose, Plan, Execute and Deliver: Developing a National Forum and Digital Deliverables Around Data Quality Evaluation presented by Grace Liu of West Chester University of Pennsylvania, et al.

The team behind the highly successful IMLS funded Data Quality Evaluation project presented the back-story of their journey from ‘failed proposal’ to the impact of engaging over a thousand organizations in 55 countries (Liu, Nagar, Bordelon, Sarti & Nguyen, 2023). They shared lessons about how to work with funding partners, how it pays to be more ambitious, the gift of good project management and a coherent brand experience. This project developed from an initial research article on Data quality problems troubling business and financial researchers: a literature review and synthesis (Liu, 2020), which has been downloaded nearly 3000 times since 2020 from the institutional repository alone. If you missed out on the live sessions, there’s still a chance to make good use of the training. The team is currently working on translating the webinar series into an Open Educational Resource (OER). In the meantime, all recordings and supporting materials are available online at the project site.

A highly accessible option to skill up in business, economic and data literacies

The BTN conference delivers well on the education mandate of the St. Louis Federal Reserve. The sessions organized by the Fed were particularly helpful to orient anyone new to working with their resources, and the system that produces it. They provide an accessible door to get started in what can easily become very esoteric terrain. Additionally, there is no registration fee, and all meals are provided. In future years I might appreciate concurrent streams that tier offerings between ‘basic’ and more ‘advanced’ sessions.

During one of the lunches, I conversed with some librarians about the state of professional organizations. At a time when there seems to be fewer opportunities for business librarians to engage with vendors and the corporate sector, the BTN conference stands out as a unique space where those opportunities continue to endure. Such opportunities are also one of the best reasons to attend the conference.

Consider getting involved: The programming committee which puts out a call for volunteers in the spring (March) and call for proposals in summer (June).