Heading to Pittsburgh, I felt I was closing a circle. Decades ago, I joined SLA as a graduate student in the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science, now transformed to be part of the university’s School of Computing and Information. This June, I returned to campus to witness the dissolution of the association in which I spent my entire professional career. It was a bittersweet circle closing.

Dissolution and Reinvention

Due to the drama surrounding the future of SLA, interest in the announcement of a potential merger of SLA and the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) was high. As president-elect Heather Kotula explained in her opening remarks, part of the dissolution announcement involved looking for another association with which to merge to forestall a bankruptcy declaration. ALA was not particularly interested. ASIS&T was. Both organizations announced on May 23, 2025, that their boards of directors had unanimously agreed to begin discussions aimed at creating a combined association.

Lydia Middleton, ASIS&T’s executive director, spoke eloquently at a town hall meeting in Pittsburgh about how she envisioned the benefits of a merger. The initiative reflects a shared commitment to strengthening the future of the information professions, delivering expanded value to members, and addressing challenges like declining membership numbers and the evolving landscape of information science. In July, members of both associations began voting on whether to accept the proposed merger. The voting period will conclude in mid-August, with a final determination to appear in late August. 

The exhibit area included a table for ASIS&T so members could ask questions about the merger.

Presentations to Shape the Future

Despite the unusual circumstances and the angst created by the knowledge that this would be the last SLA annual conference, presentations were thought-provoking, informative, and wide-ranging. They tended toward the practical, emphasizing particular projects and initiatives. Updates and discussions on specific topics, including statistics and specifications in the engineering field, chemistry research, competitive intelligence projects, and mathematics, are stalwarts of SLA conferences, as are contributions from sponsoring companies. I enjoyed presentations from Euan Adie of Overton, who discussed how to relate research to real world problems, particularly the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, and Sandy Avila of SPIE, who spoke on a panel about publishers’ contributions to a sustainable scholarly record. Syed Amaanullah’s comments on digital collection stewardship and how JSTOR is using artificial intelligence (AI) responsively were also fascinating. 

Many SLA info pros acknowledged the growing importance of AI technologies in their libraries. Applied Materials’ Valerie Rangel and Anh-Vu Doan outlined their approach to adopting a generative AI (gen AI) assistant called LIBRA into research workflows to leverage data from full-text academic papers. Their explanation of how LIBRA uses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) was particularly cogent.

RoFinCo, LLC, headed by Abigail Ellsworth Ross, specializes in overflow work for law firms. Ross has been experimenting with using gen AI to answer specific research questions. She cautioned that AI is not an answer engine or even a search engine. It’s designed to give affirmative answers over factual ones. It can be useful, but needs human oversight. Next, she plans to investigate NotebookLM and tools that can summarize the fire hose of executive orders.

Migrating content from an obsolete SharePoint platform to the more modern SharePoint Online required developing a gen AI assistant, reported Analog Devices’ Abhijith Gunturu, Ari G. Fishman, and Kelly Bunting. To update the Market Research Library at ADI Analytics, an internal repository of enterprise-related, perpetually licensed market research reports and data, many technical details regarding the architecture and contracts with external publishers had to be addressed. It’s important to have an explanation about value and ROI ready and to be persistent. The AI chatbot used RAG, graph search, and chain-of-thought reasoning. The panelists noted that Copilot can’t use metadata to determine relevance.

Other talks on harnessing the power of gen AI focused on information literacy, competitive intelligence, leadership and management of libraries, collection development and maintenance, copyright, taxonomies, astronomy research, and intellectual freedom. Patents came in for some scrutiny. Denise Callihan and Chris Byrne (see photo below) increased patent understanding for strategic initiatives at PPG by creating a visualization heat map platform.

Being a solo librarian is challenging. Miriam Heard from the YMCA of the USA and Gabrielle Hysong from Rolls-Royce come from different backgrounds and serve different organizations but agree that successful solo librarians should learn the language of their organization, make time to connect, protect their own time, and keep their work and personal spaces separate. Being in alignment with their organizations’ strategy, priorities, and people was advice that’s pertinent not only to solo librarians, but also to every SLA member. 

Tara Murray Grove looked back at the glory days of SLA from an international conference perspective with a review of the association’s 1979 annual meeting in Honolulu, dubbed the First Worldwide Conference, and its Global 2000 in Brighton, U.K., which was not an official SLA annual conference but a second globally focused one held in 2000. Although SLA has long had international communities and participation in conferences by members outside North America (Asia was particularly visible in Pittsburgh), these two were the only designated international conferences. Having attended both, her talk brought back many memories and reminded me of how SLA has become more global in the years I’ve been a member.

Speaking of international, working for organizations with operations spread across the globe brings its own set of challenges. Jeff Crump of Mercy Corps said one of his biggest issues was distributing institutional knowledge worldwide. Years ago, information from the repository was put on thumb drives and mailed. Today, it’s accessible in the cloud. Maintaining an up-to-date, well-curated knowledge hub remains challenging. Therese Mai agreed, identifying search issues with the Ford Foundation repository and its low visibility as problems that she solved by reinventing Ford Knowledge with modern knowledge management technologies. Employees thought it was new even though it wasn’t.

Commonalities of Librarians

In her keynotes (opening and closing), Emily Drabinski, ALA past president and associate professor at the Queens College (CUNY) Graduate School of Library and Information Studies, talked about the challenges facing U.S. libraries, such as censorship, banned books, closures, and funding shortfalls. Assaults on the profession, such as viewing librarians as dangerous and ineffective, affect all of us, she believes. 

Drabinski noted that there is a commonality among all types of libraries in that we find what our community needs and then work to fill that need, from checking out birthday parties to explaining gen AI. We can unite around a shared purpose and should organize around who we are, not what we do. We need to tell our stories better. Libraries are not flourishing; neither are library associations. We need to envision a new future for our associations. She particularly picked up on the spirit of the “SLA isn’t a place, it’s a people” badge ribbon (see photo below). Professional associations are about people, but the ground upon which we stand is shifting.

Creative Transformation

SLA members took the creative transformation theme to heart, displaying numerous examples of how they are working on changing their workplaces and how they define their roles. It’s not restricted to creative uses of AI technologies but extends to how research is done and communicated, how library missions are changing, and how information professional jobs are adapting. The notion of a special library has evolved, but the need to network with a like-minded community of information professionals remains constant.

A bittersweet closing of a circle for me? Yes, but more important, the sense that this is a new beginning, with opportunities waiting to be uncovered. As our profession (and its associations) transforms, as it actually has since I joined back in graduate school, I look to the future with optimism. 

Photos by Marydee Ojala