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The 2016 NASIG Annual Conference was held in Albuquerque, New Mexico in early June, and it was my first conference serving as a Member-At-Large on the Executive Committee. It was a good experience, particularly to have (then) Past President Steve Kelley also representing ZSR on the national scene. I served as the Board Liaison to the Communications and Marketing Committee for the past year, which is one of the most active committees for NASIG since it handles matters related to the organization’s website, e-mails, and social media. It was a busy assignment, but the organization’s needs were met on more than one occasion thanks to the work of all of the volunteers that made it all happen.

The rest of the conference was represented by what NASIG does best: programming and vision sessions. Here are a few highlights.

Vision Sessions. This year, the speakers for the Vision Sessions had a diverse- and at times, contrasting- viewpoints on the topics of open access and entrepreneurial librarianship. T. Scott Plutchak spoke on the “Dialectic on the Aims of Institutional Repositories” with an emphasis on the role of open access in the process of research expansion, and Heather Joseph who focused on “The Power of Open” as open access, open educational resources, and open data are beginning to realize the mission of the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2001. Not to be outdone, James J. O’Donnell asked “How Many Libraries Do We Need?” and suggested that libraries acquaint themselves with Ted Levitt’s “Marketing Myopia” article from the Harvard Business Review as reminder about their business should be in the 21st century.

What’s Next. Concurrent sessions addressed topics and technologies that are on their way for some libraries, but have already arrived for others. For instance, a session on text mining demonstrated how some providers have recognized the importance of this field as the next wave of tools for scholars. Another session relayed how the Canadian Linked Data Initiative (CLDI) was started to leverage the efforts of the largest libraries in Canada to develop a path of adoption for linked data for all libraries in that country. Other sessions of interest included streaming media, evidence-based acquisitions, and the use of institutional master agreements as alternatives with licensing to vendors/publishers.

In all, this year’s conference was a successful one. Next year’s conference will be in Indianapolis, and I will be serving as the Board Liaison for the NASIG Newsletter in addition to being the Profiles Editor for the publication. Albuquerque wasn’t without its sights, however, and I managed to get several pictures from around the city as well as the Anderson-Abruzzo Albuquerque International Balloon Museum and Isotopes Park.

(I created a Flickr page for those photos here.)