Category: Roundtables

Volume 53, Issue 3 —— Summer 2026
Meg Eastwood & Jeffra Bussman

Twenty-nine PAMily members / future CAMPers joined us in Albuquerque for our PAM Roundtable at the 2026 ASIS&T ISS-SLC. Discussion roundtables were limited to one hour (rather than the 90-minute RT sessions we have had in the past), so we focused each table onto a specific, separate discussion topic.  Conversations were rich with three (very full) tables followed by the share-out of the highlights of their discussion at the end of the session.

Our most popular table focused on Reference, Instruction, and Collections, the second most popular table discussed Generative AI, and the Open Access table came in at a solid third place. The format encouraged each table to explore their own questions in addition to the provided questions.

The Reference, Instruction, and Collections table was an “unconference” table, where participants could bring their own topics. At a conference with a strong focus on the impacts of AI, it was nice to dig into discussions of our day-to-day work.

The Generative AI table tackled topics such as how our viewpoints of AI are shaped by whether our AI use is optional or mandatory. Many reported receiving mixed messages from leadership about how AI should be used and which AI tools are allowed. A lack of university-wide policies can lead to everyone making their own policy, from instructors to students to librarians. The most pressing ethical concerns included the environmental impacts of AI and how AI can serve as a multiplier for academic fraud and lead to the theft of intellectual property. Finally, we discussed AI’s impact on cognition and the importance of teaching information literacy alongside the tools.

The Open Access table talked about the differences in open access policies between federal libraries and academic libraries. We debated whether the discussions around open access have changed much in 20 years — sometimes it feels like we’re stuck in a loop. Our discussion about the value of society publishers led some PAMily industry partners to volunteer to provide an overview of their sponsored student programs / travel grants (to be published in the PAM Bulletin).

You can check out the discussion questions and our short list of recommended readings on Generative AI. We welcome any questions you might have. Special thanks go out to Sam Hansen for providing their summary of the discussion at the AI table.

Volume 53, Issue 3 —— Summer 2026
Alex Threlkeld, Kayleigh Bohemier, and Sam Hansen

In this session, Kayleigh Bohémier, Sam Hansen, and Alex Threlkeld presented on LaTeX instruction in academic libraries. In part, this session presented work on an forthcoming sequence of articles detailing case studies of LaTeX instruction at a variety of institutions, edited by Bohémier, Willow Dressel, and Cay del Junco, and to which Hansen and Threlkeld contributed. The presenters shared their experiences with LaTeX instruction at their institutions, although a full treatment will appear in the upcoming article series. The session also briefly introduced the basic motivations for using LaTeX and common tools for writing in LaTeX, particularly Overleaf, and aimed to show that there is a lower barrier to entry in providing LaTeX instruction than many librarians realize. In particular, Overleaf provides an intuitive interface, avoids setup issues due to being cloud-based, provides comprehensive and easy-to-read documentation, and offers streamlined integrations with other tools such as Dropbox and Zotero that makes collaboration, version control, and bibliographic management straightforward.

In response to questions, there were discussions on approaches and challenges to creating accessible documents using LaTeX, with many of the challenges arising due to the common standard of sharing final documents in pdf format, where other formats, particularly html, play better with screen readers. There were also discussions on the attractiveness of LaTeX to humanists, and more generally markup languages and WYSIWYM (“What You See Is What You Mean,” as opposed to “What You See Is What You Get”) text editors, who may find useful the ability to “just write” afforded by the separation of content and style, but may not have given serious consideration to moving away from WYSIWYG editors such as Microsoft Word and Google Docs. Educational LaTeX memes were also shared.

Volume 53, Issue 3 —— Summer 2026
Phillip Jaffe

Our annual conference may be behind us, but the PAM Professional Development Committee still has more programming in store for this summer! We hope you’ll join us next month for a series of virtual roundtables in which we will discuss current issues in astronomy, physics, and mathematics. Please register at the links below:

Astronomy Roundtable
Wednesday, July 8
9 a.m. PT / 12 p.m. ET
Moderated by:
    William Jacobs, Associate Librarian for STEM, Video Games, and Comics; San Francisco State University
    Henrik Spoon, Visiting Scientist; Cornell Center for Astrophysics & Planetary Science; Cornell University

This Roundtable will feature a presentation on an immense scientific undertaking that started for real on June 30: deploying the largest telescope-mounted digital camera on Earth to take snapshots of the entire southern sky every few nights to obtain an ultra-wide, ultra-high-definition time-lapse record of our Universe.

Clare Higgs (NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory‘s Education & Public Outreach team astronomer) will tell us about the scientific goals of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time and the challenges of managing, archiving, and describing the immense amounts of data being collected every night for the next ten years.

Registration: https://yale.zoom.us/meeting/register/32ThhyjlTMmK6HhBnENzTA

Physics Roundtable
Wednesday, July 15
12 p.m. PT / 3 p.m. ET
Moderated by
    Eliot Boden, Physics and Mathematics Librarian; Washington University in St. Louis
    Emma Moore, Librarian, Mathematics and Natural Sciences; Institute for Advanced Study

Registration: https://yale.zoom.us/meeting/register/ybhS5dZESZuGpUVtSTPVCA

Mathematics Roundtable
Wednesday, July 22
9 a.m. PT / 12 p.m. ET
Moderated by:
    Jeffra Bussman, Associate Librarian for Chemistry, Mathematics, Physics; California State University, East Bay

Registration: https://yale.zoom.us/meeting/register/-HvahlEwTvCrFriuXzo7qw

Hope to see you all there!