About the EBSLG

The European Business School Librarians’ Group was established in 1970 by several business librarians to establish a forum for the exchanging of experience and professional knowledge. From that beginning, the EBSLG has grown to become a pan-European forum for the directors of the libraries of leading European business schools. There are currently 40 members structured around three geographical regions with members belonging to one of the three regional EBSLG groups: a Northern European Group; a Continental Group and the UK and Ireland Group. It was interesting to hear a little about the history of the ABLD and note the similarities; ABLD was created in the early 1990s by a group of business librarians to discuss issues and strategy.

Figure 1.

Image of author Lorna McNally in front of the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University

Pre-conference events

It was great to receive a warm welcome from ABLD members at the registration and to see some familiar faces having met a few ABLD members at the last joint conference between the ABLD, EBSLG and our other sister organisation, the APBSLG (Asia-Pacific), when it was hosted in Singapore in 2016. The pre-conference tour of the Yale campus was fascinating and, as someone with an awful sense of direction, it certainly helped me get my bearings. I also thoroughly enjoyed the tour of the Sterling Memorial Library. I think librarians more than any other profession, enjoy visiting other libraries and the Sterling Library did not disappoint. It was on this tour that I noticed a sign that piqued my interest, “The Franklin Collection & Papers of Benjamin Franklin”. I wrote a blog post about my visit (McNally, 2024).

The evening concluded with a cocktail happy hour, hosted by one of the conference sponsors, EBSCO. A very relaxed and informal get together and, as always, interesting conversations and discussions happen at the lunches, dinners, drinks receptions during any conference.

Day One

We kicked off the day hearing from Lauren di Monte, Associate University Librarian for Research and Learning at Yale, who talked about some changes to how the Library operates and the new challenges that they face. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Generative AI was on list and Lauren posed interesting questions about how we integrate this new area of support? How do we incentivise experimentation and sustainability? And possibly most crucially, how do we navigate the hype?

Ken Peterson from Harvard University delivered a summary of the various ‘Year in Review’ reports from ABLD members, and the issues and challenges are very similar to those that we face in the EBSLG. One member had suffered a huge data breach/cyber attack. Tick. This had happened to a member Library in EBSLG too. Staff recruitment. Tick. Hybrid working not as much as a theme as it has been in the past few years. Tick. Collection and vendor issues, new and cancelled databases and business school changes. Tick, tick and tick. If the ABLD does produce a table of which publishers/vendors are open/closed to Generative AI then this would be a very valuable tool for all of us.

Next, we had a lightning round all about Collections. “But I need it!” from Corey Seeman, University of Michigan and, “Everything everywhere all at once” from Hilary Schiraldi, University of California, Berkley discussing the differences between how a Library and a Business School buy and manage data. Corey described a typical librarian problem, “it’s easy to enjoy something if you don’t need to pay for it” and set the ‘magic quadrant’ of ‘Desire to have’ against ‘Willingness to contribute’.

Next up we had the vendor showcase and lunch at Mory’s Association, a Yale institution. It was great to see more familiar faces from our vendor community (PrivCo, EBSCO and WRDS) and meet some new ones (BCC Research and Data Axle). Having organised an EBSLG conference before I know how important it is to have the sponsorship of vendors; we couldn’t organise these conferences without their support. It’s always great to hear what’s new from vendors and yet again more useful conversations take place during these breaks.

After lunch I gave a brief update to everyone about the EBSLG and I highlighted the joint EBSLG – ABLD – APBSLG conference that’s taking place in 19th-22nd May 2025 at WU (Vienna University of Economics and Business) in Vienna, Austria. I was thoroughly impressed at everyone’s (well, Ryan Splenda’s mainly) knowledge of European geography! We’re looking forward to welcoming everyone in 2025, especially since the conference had to be cancelled in 2020, and we’re grateful to Niki Berger, Library Director at WU and his team for hosting us.

We heard from Balázs Kovács, Professor of Organizational Behavior, Yale School of Management on “How I use ChatGPT in my Research.” Balázs’ work looked at using ChatGPT to create online restaurant reviews and it was only a little surprising to learn that AI generated reviews are perceived as more human than those reviews written by humans.

Further sessions in the afternoon included one from Laura Walesby on recruiting new business librarians and “Campus Collaborations: Yale University x Data-Intensive Social Science Center at Yale (DISSC)” by Barbara Etsy, Data Collections Librarian at Yale.

The day ended with an excellent presentation from ISI Emerging Markets, followed by dinner. I made contact with the ISI representatives to share details about the conference in Vienna and we’ll look forward to further collaboration.

Day Two

Day two began with a lively roundtable discussion about the day-to-day ‘Dilemmas, Difficulties and Delights’. This really was an excellent session. Librarians are always open and have a willingness to share, so I found this an extremely useful session. Yet again, we find the same issues, challenges and frustrations experienced by ABLD colleagues are replicated in Europe.

The second lightning round was all about research services, and we heard from Alex Caracuzzo, Harvard Business School about “Internal Drivers of New Research and Data Services”, “Working with Faculty and PhDs: Issues and Insights” from Shikha Sharma, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Greg Fleming, University of Chicago on “Text Mining: From Nuisance to (Almost) a Service”. I have to say that I found Greg’s story of the legendary student who’d downloaded, how shall I put it, a substantial amount of data from one particular platform a familiar one. I had dealt with a student at the University of Strathclyde just weeks before who’d been blocked from the same platform for also breaching download limits, although the amounts were nowhere near the legendary status of the PhD student referenced by Greg.

The final lightning round looked at Future/Trends and we heard again from Corey about “Back to the Future: Are Business Libraries Adjusting Forward or Adjusting Back after COVID-19”. Corey discussed the results of the survey or ABLD members and we talked about whether this might be something that we could run again with EBSLG and APBSLG to get a global comparison.

After lunch we heard from past ABLD members on the ABLD History Panel Discussion. It was really interesting to get an insight into how and why the ABLD was formed and how it has developed over the years.

The final session of the afternoon was a presentation on “Drinking from the Data Firehose: Building Future-Focused Business Data Collections” by Dan Hickey, New York University. My abiding memory of Dan’s presentation was a slide that said, ‘Yes v No’ and Dan posed the question, “Are we a Yes or No organisation?” and the importance of positive framing. I have also bookmarked Dan’s LibGuide on Resources for Data Scholarship in Business & Economics (LibGuides, 2024).

That afternoon we had the pleasure of visiting the Yale University Art Gallery before enjoying the conference dinner. I am very grateful to Erin, Cristina, Carlton and everyone at ABLD and Yale for making me feel so welcome. I came back from ABLD filled with ideas and enthusiasm and have recently reported on my trip to the members attending the EBSLG conference in Prague, 23-27^th June 2024.

This was my first meeting of ABLD but I hope it won’t be my last.