A start-up conference
Charleston is the rare conference that has a founder’s story. In 1980, Katina Strauch brought some people together in the library at the College of Charleston. Her goal was to
“create something different — an event that brought publishers, vendors, and librarians together…I’ve never believed in compartmentalizing people. We’re all talking about the same things — just from different perspectives. So why not talk together? I was young and maybe a little naive, but it worked” (Strauch & Gunter, 2025, para 2.).
After 45 years, the 2025 conference was the first one that Strauch was unable to attend in person, but she did attend virtually.
Charleston also is unique among library conferences for continuing to grow. According to Executive Director Leah Hinds, “it started with 25 people; attendance hit 100 in 1986, 500 in 1997, and 1,188 exactly in 2010” (personal communication, November 2025). In 2025, 2,065 people attended in person, and 261 attended only virtually. First-time attendees included 528 of those 2,065 people.
Charleston, South Carolina has always been the location. When the author first began to attend the conference nearly 20 years ago, all conference programming took place in the historic Francis Marion Hotel. Later a second hotel a block away was added for much needed meeting space. In 2016, the conference added a third facility, the new Galliard Center, a performing arts and conference center, which opened just in time to support the continued growth in attendance. The Francis Marion and Galliard Center are about a 10-minute walk apart on the same street, with the other hotel in the middle.
The Charleston Conference and its publications were acquired by the nonprofit Annual Reviews in 2023. (The author has not noticed any changes in the nature of the conference.) Charleston Conference Asia debuted in January 2026 in Bangkok, Thailand. Charleston also has a small conference each year as part of the Frankfurt (Germany) Book Fair.
Nature of the Charleston Conference
Charleston’s mission is to “foster open dialogue, innovation, and collaboration across all sectors of scholarly communication while preserving the collegial, independent spirit that makes Charleston unique” (Charleston Hub, 2025). Charleston attracts librarians, publishers, and vendors interested in scholarly communications, publishing, library collections, user experience, and related topics.
Most of the librarians who attend work in collection development, electronic resources, and scholarly communications. However, subject librarians and library liaisons also attend. Health science librarians have long had a presence at Charleston. Now business librarians are attending Charleston in larger numbers. To complement that increase, the business-related vendors attending and exhibiting at the conference has grown as well.
Charleston only includes one day of exhibits, called the Vendor Showcase. For the rest of the conference, publishers and vendors are strongly encouraged to attend the conference alongside the librarians to speak, discuss, and debate together. Librarians often recruit vendor and publisher representatives to join a proposed panel. See below for examples. The author finds that this diversity of experiences and points of view at Charleston often leads to deeper and more interesting discussions, compared to library conferences in which vendors and publishers remain banished to the exhibit hall for the entire conference.
In 2025, the common themes at the conference seemed to be:
AI (Artificial Intelligence)
Integrity in scholarly communication
Evolving access and subscription models
Well-being and workforce issues
Academic freedom and censorship.
Charleston includes both physical and virtual programming. The physical conference happens in early November from a Tuesday through Friday (in 2025, November 4-7). Tuesday is devoted to the Vendor’s Showcase. Most of the programming from Wednesday through Friday is video recorded.
Two weeks later, the virtual conference runs. The Monday and Tuesday of the virtual conference feature unique programming pre-recorded and shared through Whova and Zoom. Live discussions and Q/A with the speakers follow the recordings. Wednesday through Friday of the virtual conference consists of the recordings made at the physical conference two weeks earlier. All these recordings are viewable on demand to physical and virtual attendees. Eventually the recordings are made available on the Charleston Hub YouTube channel (Charleston Hub, 2026).
All Charleston speakers are invited to submit a conference proceeding of their talks. The proceedings are published open access around 12 months after the conference. (Against the Grain, 2026).
Charleston Formats
Charleston features a mix of formats. The author finds the variety helpful in remaining alert and engaged through a long conference day:
Preconferences
Keynotes
Plenary panels
Concurrent sessions (panels)
Stopwatch sessions (lightning rounds, 7 minutes each)
Lively discussions (in which slides are only used to display discussion questions)
Posters
Food and networking breaks
Innovation sessions (10-minute lightning talks on an innovative project, product, or practice, with audience questions and discussion)
Charleston premiers (10 new products, selected by a jury, showcased for 5 minutes each; attendees vote on three "best of" categories)
Sponsored sessions (20-minute vendor demonstrations during the Vendor Showcase)
The mix of formats at Charleston over the years continues to evolve. Some formats have come and gone as the conference directors review attendance and feedback, not unlike the notion of fast failure in lean entrepreneurship. The author appreciates the creativity and risk-taking.
In the 2025 “Poll-a-palooza” closing session, Charleston attendees rated “networking” as their favorite activity, followed closely by “concurrent sessions.”
Business Librarianship & Charleston
Business librarians have been networking at Charleston for at least 10 years. While there have long been business librarians speaking with other types of librarians on more general collection topics, the first business librarianship program that the author and Cynthia Cronin-Kardon (another long-time attendee) remember was in 2016: “Why business content subscriptions can drive us crazy, and what to do about it: A dialogue with business librarians, business vendors, and the audience on best practices and solutions.” The lively discussion moderators included 4 librarians and 2 vendors (Dan Gingert of PrivCo and the late John Quealy of S&P Global). The attendees included librarians and additional vendors.
The number of business librarians who attend Charleston has averaged 15-20 in the last few years. Each year, we use BUSLIB-L to learn who plans on attending the conference and then use a shared Google Document to promote collaboration on submissions and to share invitations to vendor-funded socials.
The number of business vendors exhibiting at Charleston’s Vendor Showcase is also increasing. Bloomberg.com and Dewey Data attended for the first time in 2025. (Both were chosen to compete in the Charleston Premiers event.) Many business vendors now attend the conference one or more days after the showcase, speaking and networking with the librarians.
At each Charleston, business librarians enjoy vendor-sponsored happy hours and dinners. In 2025, taking advantage of the lovely Charleston weather, our happy hours included two on rooftops and one on a park-side patio; we also enjoyed a fancy dinner (see pictures of these events at Cramer, 2025). Our socials at Charleston have been sponsored by Business Expert Press, Data Axle, Dewey Data, Euromonitor, Gale, Mergent, PrivCo, Sage, SimplyAnalytics, and S&P. We appreciate their support of community building.
Vendor Showcase
As noted above, the vendor showcase is the main event on the Tuesday of the physical conference. Free coffee and snacks are provided throughout the day. This year, Charleston sold out all 148 exhibitor tables. Three AI companies attended for the first time: Consensus, Scite (part of Research Solutions), and Moara.
Session Highlights in Charleston
“Demystifying database product management: What happens when students love it but librarians don’t”
Alice Kalinowski (Public Services Manager, Stanford Graduate School of Business) recruited Ryan Walter (Principal UX Researcher, EBSCO) and Chelsi Slotten (Product Manager, Sage) for this panel. All forty chairs in the room were full, and some people were standing in the back. Kalinowski asked the panelists how they balance and prioritize the differing user needs, what their process is for collecting and synthesizing user feedback, and how they develop AI features for their products, among other questions. Walker and Slotten confirmed that balancing the needs of many diverse groups of users is a major struggle. For example, when asked to “show us how you search,” students show their strong preferences for simple search screens and quick search responses. Walker noted that in the former, classic EBSCOhost interface, only four filters accounted for 99% of all student use of filters: peer review, full text, source type, and date. The other filters and advanced features were almost never used by students. Meanwhile, librarians (and some researchers) tend to want many search options and advanced features. Slotten discussed how focus groups have also helped shape product development. After receiving comments that too many search results came from the Sage video collection, Sage tweaked an algorithm to provide a more diverse mix of formats in the search results. Usage data, usability testing, focus groups, and sales team feedback all contribute to the complex process of product design.
“Between a bot and a hard place: Librarians on the forefront of AI integration and implementation”
This was a well-facilitated “lively discussion.” Kate Silton (Electronic Resources Librarian) and Kathy Shields (Research and Instruction Librarian for History and Social Sciences and Research Services Lead) of Wake Forest University asked attendees to form small groups and discuss questions on whether and how librarians are using AI tools added to vendor products. Questions included: “How are you deciding what AI tools to turn on or off?”, “What kind of assessment are you using - ethical, technical, accessibility, educational, financial, other?”, and “What kinds of policies are you creating to guide the selection or adoption of AI tools?” As expected, there were varied answers and different attitudes expressed, including blanket rejections of AI as well as more thoughtful and nuanced considerations on AI’s value in a database. Many vendor representatives also attended.
“Executive Services: Making your library’s impact visible to administrators”
Laura Egan (Head of Collection Strategies, University of North Dakota) designed this talk to also serve as a workshop on outreach. Attendees came away from the session with a list of ideas and strategies to implement on their own campus for demonstrating the value of their library. The ideas and strategies also applied to department heads, program directories, career service centers, and research centers. Ideas included providing access to practical ebooks on management, establishing return on investment for collections spending, collecting usage data from the institutional repository, determining student savings from OER, determining faculty savings from transformative (“read and publish”) deals, conducting literature reviews on topics requested by administration, and promoting librarians’ negotiation skills that could be applied to products and subscriptions outside the library’s normal purview.
“Is there still room for A&I in an AI world?”
Sarah Wessel (Managing Editor, Christian Periodical Index, Association of Christian Librarians) and Laura Ladwig (Director of Library Services, Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary) were the speakers. As a business librarian who rarely uses specialized abstracting and indexing (A&I) databases (with perhaps the EBSCO-augmented version of ECONLIT being the exception), this author was curious to learn what the general attitude would be in this talk. The vibe proved to be thoughtful and realistic. Wessel and Ladwig briefly reviewed the long history of A&I databases before examining how well modern library discovery systems cover the A&I tools in their searches and ranking algorithms. The speakers transitioned to comparing the controlled subject vocabulary provided by an A&I database for a specific article to the list of keywords provided by generative AI. Do human editor skills remain superior to that of semantic AI searches? Which set of words is more useful for natural language searching? The session ended with Ladwig summarizing her recent, successful efforts to promote usage of two A&I databases at her seminary.
“So you’re an R1 now: Opportunities and challenges for new and emerging R1s (and R2s)”
Rosalind Tedford (Director of Research, Instruction, and Outreach, Wake Forest University) and Candice Benjes-Small (Head of Research, William & Mary) led this vibrant lively discussion. They had us form three circles for small group discussions. Most of the librarians represented new R1 campuses or R2 campuses on the verge of becoming R1s. Our facilitators began with a short introduction to the Carnegie research classifications, polled the audience members on their status, and proceeded to the discussion questions. We learned that library funding of collections has no bearing on the classification. Some R1 libraries spend less on collections than some R2 libraries. There was much discussion – and some amusement – about faculty expectations of library funding and support upon attaining R1 status. No, library funding does not automatically increase to match the increased faculty expectations for journals, databases, and datasets. However, some libraries have used benchmarking data from R1 libraries to demonstrate the underfunding of their library. Libraries serving newly designated R1 campuses might need to invest in an increased level of support for scholarly communications, research data services, and systematic reviews. Some new R1 libraries debate their support for the curriculum (teaching and learning) versus support for research. By the end of this discussion, there was much comradery among the attendees.
“AI in action: Perspectives and best practices for the evolving role of libraries”
Harsh Jegadeesan (Chief Publishing Officer, Springer Nature) led a panel that included Jee Davis (University Librarian, American University), Helen Bischoff (Liaison Coordinator, University of Kentucky Libraries), and Evan Simpson (Associate Dean, Experiential Learning and Academic Engagement Northeastern University Library). An upcoming Springer Nature AI perspectives report was the impetus for this program. The panel covered much ground, with the goal that “attendees w[ould] gain a deeper understanding of how libraries can lead in AI literacy, support research integrity, and collaborate with publishers to ensure AI tools are transparent, inclusive, and aligned with scholarly values” (Charleston Hub, 2025). This author appreciated the panelists for focusing on how they and their libraries are using AI, and making decisions about how to use AI, rather than focusing on speculation and fears. The author took interest in how Bischoff uses AI. Examples included generating feedback on instructional design, mapping standards, creating point of need tutorials using Scribe, creating graphic organizers and assessment tools, and creating podcasts for students to analyze in a class. Two themes emerged: proactive engagement of the library with campus AI needs and initiatives, and the leveraging of librarian skills to evaluate AI tools. “Evaluating information is our job,” one panelist noted. The panel concluded with best practices: libraries and campuses should have clear policies on usage; library leaders need to provide change management and support their people in the use of AI; and discussions and messaging regarding AI need to be nuanced, given the complexities and varieties of AI, and customized to the various stakeholders on campus (don’t default to library jargon).
“Making the cut: What to do when the budget tightens”
This was a 7-minute lightning round by Chuck Knight (Business Information Librarian for Collections, Vanderbilt University). He began with a story of helping create a business continuity plan (like a disaster plan) at a benefits fund office for union workers in early 2020. There are parallels to planning for budget cuts to collections. He suggested five strategies: develop and maintain rapport with vendors, which makes negotiations easier, by “fac[ing] the problem, not the people”; embrace transparency and clear communication through “tell[ing] your budget story”; know your resources and how they are packaged and priced; keep a list of alternative sources (free and subscription-based); and maintain a possible cuts list (and revisit the list regularly).
“Intercultural communication on budget cuts: how to talk to and work with your public service librarians on cancellation decisions”
This was a lightning talk by Breezy Silver (Business Collections Librarian, Michigan State University, Gast Business Library) and this author, Steve Cramer (Business Librarian, UNC Greensboro). Cramer began with an anecdote from the Carolina Consortium annual conference in May 2025. After a panel about using rubrics to help decide on database cancellations, he overheard two librarians say, “That rubric looks great! We should try that!” “Well, yes except that our public service librarians would just say, ‘We can’t cut database X, it’s such a nice one!’ Cramer reported that he was at first insulted by that characterization but later decided they were probably correct about us. Silver and Cramer proceeded to contrast the cultures and stereotypes of technical services librarians compared to public service librarians in budget cutting considerations. Communication and sharing are key to connecting the two cultures. Technical services can share quantitative considerations as well as the vendor’s ease of use; public services can share curriculum research needs, how students and faculty use each product, and the availability of any alternative sources. Silver provided a case study as a mediator between subject liaisons and a collections head. She created a spreadsheet to standardize and share information. She concluded with three best practices: give everyone a chance to provide input; meet as a team to build consensus; and communicate the team's decisions with the evidence to the decision maker.
“AI literacy: A panel discussion focused on what’s going on, and where might things be going next?”
Ashleigh Faith (Director of AI and Semantic Innovation, EBSCO), Jennifer Freer (Saunders College of Business Liaison/Librarian, Rochester Institute of Technology), Donovan Thomas (MBA candidate, Brandeis University) and Angela Gibson (Senior Director of Operational Strategy, MLA) discussed generative AI’s impact on faculty research and students’ critical thinking. Freer suggested that AI used as a tool, not a shortcut, can be a disrupter “in a good way,” challenging the static and dogmatic nature of information literacy as defined by the ACRL Frameworks. The black box aspect of AI is certainly a challenge. Both students and faculty researchers should adopt a “trust but verify” mindset in using AI. Thomas emphasized that students must not try to let AI replace the thinking and analysis required in their academic and professional work. Gibson discussed how she and her fellow editors are debating how to cover AI in the next edition of the MLA Handbook. The panelists agreed that the lack of standards and campus policies on AI result in confusion and limited information literacy growth in students.
“Cutting Through the Noise: How Vendors and Librarians can Respond to What Faculty Want (But Rarely Say)”
Rhonda Contreras (Associate Director, Engagement, Sage) recruited Neal Baker (Business Information Specialist, Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies), Lee Sutherlin (Senior Faculty Engagement Partner, Sage), and this author, Steve Cramer (Business Librarian, UNC Greensboro) for this panel. They discussed the nature of successful faculty engagement and provided short case studies. Contreras also asked the panelists to confront common challenges or misconceptions about faculty engagement and to suggest how libraries and publishers can partner to better support faculty. Common themes included engaging proactively, building relationships, not assuming we know what faculty think or want, leaving library jargon behind in the library, and pitching the high value librarians bring to the table. Baker, who has a background in advancement, noted that none of the libraries he has worked in had a plan, criteria, or reporting method for faculty engagement. ACRL doesn’t provide any guidance or standards either. This is very different from the practices of advancement. Sutherlin and Cramer collaborated on a project to create custom, subject-specific lists of Sage resources for many individual classes at Cramer’s business school. Cramer was able to connect with many faculty and classes he normally doesn’t work with. The panel concluded with a call to think of the library-vendor relationship as a partnership to support both faculty and library success.
Concluding Thoughts
In his long career, the author has attended most of the major national library conferences—¬-including a few that no longer exist. Charleston is the conference that I now attend most often. One reason is, simply, the location (I can drive there in five hours). Others include the lovely weather in this historic, beautiful coastal city and the fine dining with librarian friends, often sponsored by vendor friends.
However, a more important reason is the author’s exposure at Charleston to ideas and insights very relevant to his work but outside his normal comfort zone of library liaison public services. The author uses Charleston to keep up with developments in collections, publishing, and scholarly communication. He returns better able to engage with and even lead discussions with faculty and graduate students on their research needs and the nature of academic publishing. He is also better equipped to discuss, debate, and even negotiate with vendors as we work on renewals or new licensing and subscriptions. Liaisons I know who don’t attend Charleston tend to be less knowledgeable and comfortable discussing trends in collections and scholarly communication, and more likely to express an unhelpful us-versus-them mindset regarding vendors and publishers.
The author also appreciates the high return on investment for a Charleston Conference registration. The Wednesdays and Thursdays of the physical conference usually offer over nine hours of programming (8:30am to 6pm) in diverse formats and often multiple programs that piques one’s interest during each timeslot. With the new virtual format, if an attendee needs a break and takes an hour or two off, they can watch the recording of any event two weeks later. In addition, there are two days of virtual-only content, resulting in five days total of Charleston programming plus the vendor showcase day. The videos and conference proceedings provide easy opportunities for re-engagement as needed.
Finally, there actually is public service content at Charleston, given the programming on user behavior and user experiences each year. For example, many of the panels summarizing what libraries are doing with AI included discussion of AI information literacy efforts and the integration of AI into research instruction. The lively discussion formats and the ample networking opportunities also provide ample opportunities for library liaisons to talk shop beyond collections and publishing.
References
Against the Grain. (2026). Charleston Conference Proceedings. https://www.fulcrum.org/cp?locale=enhttps://www.fulcrum.org/cp?locale=en
Charleston Hub. (2025). The Charleston Conference 2025: Registration info. https://www.charleston-hub.com/the-charleston-conference/about-the-conference/https://www.charleston-hub.com/the-charleston-conference/about-the-conference/
Charleston Hub. (2026). https://www.youtube.com/@CharlestonConferencehttps://www.youtube.com/@CharlestonConference
Cramer, S. (2025, December 1). Snapshots from Charleston Conference 2025. [Blog Post]. This Liaison Life. https://liaisonlife.wordpress.com/2025/12/01/charleston-conference-2025/https://liaisonlife.wordpress.com/2025/12/01/charleston-conference-2025/
Knight, C. (2025) 2024 Charleston Conference: Through the eyes of a first timer. Ticker: The Academic Business Librarianship Review, 10(1). DOI: https://doi.org/10.3998/ticker.7269https://doi.org/10.3998/ticker.7269
Strauch, K. & Gunter, D.W. (2025). Doing the Charleston: My personal history of scholarly communication. Against the Grain. https://directory.doabooks.org/handle/20.500.12854/161243https://directory.doabooks.org/handle/20.500.12854/161243
