Copley Connects Spring/Summer 2025

ACRL Conference in Minneapolis By Amy Pham , Senior Electronic and Open Content Librarian In April, I presented “Who’s asking?: Gender, race, and negotiation outcomes” at the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Conference. As the lead higher education association for academic and research librarians, ACRL’s biennial conference showcases original and emerging research focused on academic librarianship. My research was published as a contributed paper in the ACRL 2025 Conference Proceedings and addressed the experiences of academic librarians in library-vendor negotiations. As libraries confront unsustainable inflationary costs for collection resources, the paper recognized negotiation as a necessary skill for librarians. Building on previously established research on gender, race, and negotiation in the adjacent fields of business and communications, I developed new findings

through an interview study examining qualitative, individual negotiation experiences of academic librarians. Contrary to previous studies that found women were at a disadvantage in negotiations, both in their approach to negotiations and their experienced outcomes, I found that female librarians negotiating for academic electronic resources are data-driven, communicative, and experience success, regardless of gender or race. However, while negotiation outcomes may be unaffected by gender or race, librarians experience a range of uncomfortable and, sometimes, discriminatory behavior during negotiations. I called for further study of negotiation interactions to identify and address problematic behavior and provide solutions for improving negotiation interactions. You can read my study at https://digital.sandiego.edu/library_facpub/33/. The ACRL Conference is highly selective, with a proposal acceptance rate of 20-30%. implementing them extensively. The “Librarians Engineering Our Way to Good Peer Review Feedback” presentation, which opened with an acknowledgement from Copley’s V Dozier’s influential work “Existing on Erasure’s Edge: BIPOC Treatment in Peer Review,” offered valuable strategies for improving scholarly communication. At the Texas A&M session, I had the opportunity to discuss the impact of embedded engineering librarianship compared to my experience as a STEM reference librarian at Prairie View A&M University. Additionally, I attended USD faculty presentations, including Susan Lord’s talk on pedagogy in her engineering circuits course, which deepened my understanding of their teaching methods and projects. The conference also provided excellent opportunities to engage with the Engineering Libraries Division (ELD) and explore options for committee involvement in national service. It was great to put a face to people I’ve seen online in the ASEE community.

American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Conference By Michael Massaro , Engineering and Computer Science Librarian

The 2025 American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Conference in Montreal proved to be an enriching experience filled with professional connections, collaborative opportunities, and insights into

engineering education. One of the conference highlights was reconnecting with Haoyong Lan, Carnegie Mellon’s STEM Librarian, who I first met in 2019 when we were both Graduate Assistants at Grainger Engineering Library at the University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign (UIUC). I also met Zach Lannes, Stanford’s Engineering Librarian, and we’re now collaborating on a project together to reinvigorate the West Coast Science Boot Camp. The conference featured compelling presentations that showcased innovative approaches to engineering librarianship. A session on citation analysis with AI demonstrated how accurate these tools have become, with UIUC already

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