Professional Development Grant Report: ALA Annual Conference 2024

I was fortunate to be able to attend ALA Annual 2024 in San Diego, CA June 28-July 2, 2024 with the assistance of the NCNMLG Professional Development Award. I am a fairly new academic librarian at California State University, Sacramento. Since I am still exploring what my research focus will be, a large conference like ALA was appealing to get a sampling of research across many different topics. I had not attended this conference since 2015, and it was heartening to see the turnout and participation gradually returning to pre-pandemic levels. 

A major focus of this year’s conference programming was unsurprisingly artificial intelligence (AI). I attended several sessions on this topic, ranging from how to design AI prompts to incorporating AI into information literacy instruction. I was able to share several resources I learned about with my colleagues in the research and instruction department, and it spurred me and two other colleagues to create an AI literacy research guide of our own for our faculty and students. We have been promoting this guide this semester and have received positive feedback so far.

As our institution prepares for its reclassification to an R2 university, we are expecting an uptick in research service needs, one of which may be research data management services. I made sure to attend two panel sessions on data literacy (“Developing Data Literacy Champions: Building a Culture of Critical Engagement with Data”) and Open Science (“Open Science Conversations: Academic Library Engagement, Outreach & Services in the Year of Open Science”) which were great resources to prepare for these services. The topic of AI bled into these sessions, and I was surprised to discover a new challenge to Open Access: researchers are hesitant to deposit their works into open repositories for fear that proprietary AI will harvest their work and use it as training content. I also learned about features and benefits of Open Science to create buy-in with researchers, such as streamlining their research process, eliminating loss of data, versioning control, and justifying that higher education is valuable in society to policymakers and the general public.

One particularly special aspect about my attendance this year was that I was able to attend the ALA Spectrum Scholarship graduation lunch. I am a Spectrum Scholar alum (2012) and the current co-chair of the scholarship jury, so getting to meet and celebrate this year’s awardees was particularly rewarding. I also was able to meet my co-chair and ODLOS staff for the first time in person after more than two years of Zoom meetings, and this would not have been possible without the NCNMLG award. I encourage anyone considering applying for this award to apply, as it greatly helped with my professional development.


– Submitted by Alicia Zuniga