Welcome to the annual conference issue of Ticker, wherein you’ll get a pretty good overview of the content delivered, discussed, and at times debated, at the Academic Business Library Directors (ABLD) Annual Meeting, which was hosted this year by Erin Wachowicz of Yale University from April 23^rd to 26^th in New Haven, Connecticut. The theme of the meeting was “Exploring the Digital Frontier”, so of course we discussed artificial intelligence, but also the evolution of data services in libraries, text mining, and overall trends in academic business librarianship.

In this issue we have two overviews of the Annual Meeting, from two different perspectives. First, Corey Seeman discusses our past two Annual Meetings in his article “Academic Business Library Directors Annual Conference 2023 & 2024”. The 2023 Meeting included presentations on student engagement ideas – extensive research projects, entrepreneurship and career management guidance, and gamification! – the recruitment and retention of academic business librarians, the potential for future collaboration between libraries and Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (the accreditation organization for business education), how to make a case for a second business librarian, and more.

The 2024 Meeting, focused on a technologic theme, explored how libraries are adapting to an educational landscape that seems to be evolving faster than ever these past few years. There was no escaping the impact of generative AI in education, both as a topic we debated as part of a roundtable discussion one morning, but also as the focus of our faculty presentation from Professor of Organizational Behavior Balázs Kovács (Yale School of Management), who presented on the topic of “How I use ChatGPT in my Research”. Other topics explored were the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of programs and research on our campuses, managing data acquisition and access and how we might be returning to normal, or a new normal, after the upheaval of the early 2020s.

We also got an update from our European counterpart to the ABLD, the European Business School Librarians’ Group (EBSLG), thanks to the attendance of President Lorna McNally, who also wrote us an article for this issue, “A Postcard from Yale”, wherein she shares her experience attending our Meeting this year. Lorna discusses the commonalities she sees in our day-to-day challenges as academic business librarians and the emerging technology we’re confronting with various levels of comfort and enthusiasm. We look very forward to learning more from our ‘older sister’ organization next year at the 2025 APBSLG-ABLD-EBSLG Joint Meeting, which will take place at WU Vienna University for Economics & Business from May 19 to May 22, 2025.

Barbara Esty, Data Collections Librarian, and Erin Wachowicz, Librarian for Business and Management, both of Yale University, have been kind enough to summarize their presentation for us in their article “When Demand Outpaces Supply: The Evolution of Data Services at Yale University". They walk us through their library’s research data management services, from all the way back to when the library first began collecting social sciences data in 1972, to their first Social Sciences Data Librarian position in 1977, to the formation of their Social Science Statistical Laboratory (Stalab) and the co-development of their first Data and Electronic Services Librarian position in 1997. The growing interdisciplinarity of researchers’ data needs led to increasing collaboration between data and business librarians over time. The authors discuss how they take a team approach to reference these days, combining their strengths and areas of expertise to improve workflows and address the ever-increasing demands of a growing researcher base. They explain how they have started to further grow their support base via strategic partnerships with other campus offices and services, and how they plan to build a sustainable model to carry their work forward.

In “Text Mining: From Nuisance to (almost) a Service at the University of Chicago Library” Greg Flemming takes us deeper into one particular area of data (almost) services as he explains how the University of Chicago faced a growing demand for text mining services, starting precipitously in 2005 when someone conducted research using web scraping before vendors had restricted their licensing in response to the methodology. This early web scraping has been seen by later researchers as a methodology they would like to replicate, but now that licensing restricts this usage, what are libraries to do? Greg discusses multiple data options from large XML ZIP files, to limited online solutions, to online platforms that allow users to work with larger datasets. Greg highlights the solutions the University of Chicago have thus far found most fitting and discusses how the library is working to add text mining language to licenses when they renew existing subscriptions, or when they add new resources. It seems likely most academic libraries will need to grapple with questions related to text mining eventually, so this article might be a nice introduction for those less familiar with the vagaries of this service.

Lastly, Ken Peterson presents us with the annual “Trends in Academic Business Libraries 2022-2023: Highlights from Annual Reports of the Academic Business Library Directors (ABLD)”. This report highlights results from an annual survey of ABLD members wherein we explore: new and ongoing initiatives, organizational changes, staff developments, physical space improvements, collection changes, budget issues, vendor issues, business school-related matters, key factors affecting libraries, and other relevant updates in our libraries. This year the survey highlighted AI challenges, the evolution of open access, strategic planning challenges, diversity and inclusion concerns, and financial challenges. Staffing churn, an increasing emphasis on global collaboration and an emphasis in physical spaces on flexible and collaborative configurations were also themes of note.

I hope this issue will allow others to benefit from the expertise and discussion of the ABLD Annual Meeting. Readers, please note that this will be the last issue Ticker devotes solely to Annual Meeting content, so look out for article calls next year as we expand our Winter issue to include more content on the annual theme!