If there is a thick level of yellow pollen on the hood of my car then it must be time for SOUCABL! Typically held every spring, the Southern University College and Academic Business Librarians’ Conference (SOUCABL) is a can’t miss event if you happen to be… you guessed it… a Business Librarian* (check) at an academic institution (check, check) in one of the 14 states** (plus the District of Columbia) that we commonly think of as the “south” (check,check, aaand check). Currently being held at the Darla Moore Business School at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, SC, SOUCABL offers business librarians the opportunity to get together, network, chat with vendors, and discuss the hot button issues facing business librarians today (*hint* it’s AI…and other stuff). Here are our highlights:

Summer

Though the two days of SOUCABL were packed with insightful content, my two favorite presentations were the last. The first was presented by UNC-Wilmington’s Business Librarian, Ophelia Chapman, and her colleague, Professor Dorcas Dennis. They discussed preliminary findings from a survey administered to both MBA students and an upper-level honors class regarding their familiarity with, and perceptions of, AI tools useful for assisting with literature reviews, such as Research Rabbit, Elicit, and Litmaps (*one reason these particular tools were chosen was their ability to integrate with Zotero!). It was interesting to note from their results that students—both undergraduates and graduates—had not heard of these tools prior to the class. Students also reported feeling that some of the tools were redundant or had limited effectiveness in niche areas, although they generally saw value in using them. The presenters are awaiting final survey results and plan to continue analyzing the data to further determine students’ perceptions of improvements in efficiency and research quality. I look forward to hearing more details. Morgan and I plan to release a survey soon to WFU MSM and MSBA graduates, and several of our questions address their familiarity with and use of AI tools in relation to their consulting projects, so this could make for an interesting comparative use case!

The other presentation that stood out to me was titled “The Business Librarian Index: Navigating Shifting Priorities in the Academic Landscape,” presented by business librarians Nancy Lovas (UNC-Chapel Hill) and Edward Lim (University of Connecticut). They developed the Business Librarian Index as a method to visualize, gauge, and compare work priorities across positions, specifically among business library liaisons, after analyzing job descriptions from various business librarians over the past five years. I found this presentation particularly insightful, especially concerning writing annual letters and preparing for promotion or renewal. It seems like a great way to visualize where you’re spending the most time and having the most impact.

Morgan

While all the content at SOUCABL this year was interesting and relevant; I took the most away from a session on AI called “AI Use Cases in Business, Higher Education & Libraries: Examples, Frameworks and Experimentation” by Trip Wycoff, Entrepreneurial Outreach Librarian for the Florida State University Libraries and HD McKay, Librarian for Business and Lecturer at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management as well as from the keynote on “Evidence Synthesis in Management” by Ryan Splenda, Business & Economics Librarian at Carnegie Mellon University.

The pre conference for SOUCABL this year was focused on AI applications and implications in business information literacy and instruction. In Trip and HD’s presentation “AI Use Cases in Business, Higher Education & Libraries: Examples, Frameworks and Experimentation”; which opened the pre conference, they presented a variety of frameworks and use cases for implementing AI when working with business students and scholars as well as provided some time and guidance for experimenting with creating our own AI chatbot using HuggingChat. Starting their presentation by sharing Gartner Research’s (click me first) collected use cases of how business is using AI (then click me) really served to highlight how industry is expecting new graduates with business degrees to come into the workforce being intimately familiar with using, integrating, and innovating with artificial intelligence in their everyday work. As librarians we work hard to emphasize the practical (aka “real world”) application of research and information literacy best practices we share with our students and this presentation underscored the importance of staying up to date and in-practice with how artificial intelligence tools and technologies intersect with those best practices. I also loved getting to create a chatbot using HuggingChat which I (lovingly) christened “The New BOB”. It was fairly straightforward to build on the HuggingChat platform. Here are the system instructions I gave it:

“You will provide business-related information literacy instruction including source recommendation, search strategy optimization, citation support, and research consultation

Provides technical guidance on the use of popular business databases and resources. The assistant should not provide exact answers to queries but guidance and suggestions in order to move the requester’s research forward and closer to answering their research need

Assistant should always cite sources of information. If you don’t know the answer please don’t make up a response and suggest the user reach out to their business librarian. Tone should be formal but warm and approachable.”

Ideally, with some more tweaking, I could see a future where I could add this to a research guide or out-of-office message for researchers to utilize when I am not immediately available. You can try out your business-related reference questions on “The New BOB” here

The second presentation I wanted to highlight was the conference keynote “Evidence Synthesis in Management” by Ryan Splenda, Business & Economics Librarian at Carnegie Mellon University. Unlike Summer and several of our colleagues, I have not attended the famous Evidence Synthesis Institute for library staff supporting evidence syntheses (ES) in topics outside of the health sciences, but it’s a topic that has been coming up increasingly in professional circles, so I was eager to get a business-specific primer from an expert like Ryan. Ryan confirmed a hunch I had that there is a growing demand for ES in Business & Management. With the goal of increasing transparency, reducing bias, and improving the reproducibility of research and with publications like this one reporting that there is a “credibility crisis and related replication crisis in business research” it’s no surprise to me that as business librarians we are starting to hear more about ES. Ryan’s talk did a great job highlighting not only what an asset a librarian can be in the ES process but also just the sheer amount of time and labor that is required to successfully complete a single ES project. This is notable because unlike Wake Forest, most business librarians are solo practitioners and if we begin to see a growing call for ES services in institutions and departments, serious questions of capacity would need to be addressed. While I’ve personally not seen a demand for ES services in our School of Business here at Wake Forest, there is discussion about evidence based or evidence informed practice which, in and of itself is informed by ES projects. This will definitely be a space I continue to watch and explore.

Bonus Content

If you continue to be interested in the use AI in research, I thought the following three slides from Zoeanna Mayhook (Purdue), Dr. Jing Lu (Purdue), Christina Gangwisch (Georgia State) and Jennifer Horne’s ( University of Kentucky) presentation “AI assistants for Business Literature Reviews” to be super useful references:

* you don’t have to be a Business Librarian

** you can actually come from anywhere