Southeast Data Librarian Symposium 2026

Posted by kimberlycarlo on November 2nd, 2026 Posted in: Blog

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The 2026 Southeast Data Librarian Symposium was held online from Wednesday, October 14^th to Friday, October 16^th. The theme was “The People’s Data: Access, Literacy, and Trust.” Some of the topics of interest included accessibility in data and data visualization, the patron-focused side of working with AI, data literacy and teaching, and so much more. Along with taking place online, this conference was free for anyone to attend this year, which makes this conference one of the most accessible.

As someone who is interested in data instruction, one of the presentations that stuck out to me was “Grounded in Code: Teaching Python and R Programming, Complemented by AI for Data Visualization” by Doug Dechow and Elaine Yeung from Chapman University. The presenters shared the fundamentals and the lineup of both workshop series, which I found inspirational for potential future teaching opportunities. The presenters emphasized that AI is not to be used as a shortcut to replace the skills programmers use and how data literacy skills are essential when using AI as a tool to complement your work. The CREATE framework is something that was new to me as well. This framework is credited to David Birss, which can be used to write effective prompts for ChatGPT. You can learn more about this framework in “The Prompt Collection.” There was another tool shared that was a LibGuide created by Chapman University on “Artificial Intelligence (AI) Literacy: Citing AI in Your Work.” I highly recommend going over the slides to this presentation so you can see their results on how to balance the use of AI tools when coding and “creating publication-level data.”

 

One of the presentations from the poster session by Jenna Courtade called “Show Me the Data: Highlighting Data Collections Through Digital Library Resources.” Courtade had come to see that the University of Miami Libraries did not have a singular place to answer the question ‘what data does the library provide access to?’ since the data resources in her library were “distributed among different resource guides.” Courtade then went on to compile these resources into a single resource guide called “Datasets and Statistics.” In her poster presentation, she shared her inspiration, the results of the environmental scan and assessments, and shares lessons learned for other libraries who are looking to take on a similar project. This poster would be great for anyone to review, especially if you are starting data services at your institution or looking to improve data services at your library.

 

A few of the 2026 NNLM’s National Center for Data Services Data Interns had also presented at this conference. There is a file on OSF where you can view all of the poster presentations at SEDLS. Here is a list of the presentations from this year’s interns:

• Brittney Johns- “From Identification to Remediation: Applying MaRMAT and Developing Lexicon for Reparative Descriptions”
• Sarina Haryanto- “Unearthing the LIDS dataset: Collaborative data curation to expand data literacy”
• Cate Gvon- “Deep Blue Repositories Data Migration”
• Kirsten Bedford- “Learning Through Data-Reuse: Lessons Learned From a Secondary Analysis of the Library Data Services (LIDS) Dataset”
• Jenna Kincaid- Capturing Ecological Metadata Language (EML) in a Generalist Data Repository using the ezEML Tool”
• Isha Shadale, Bendan O’Hagan, Erika Vásquez- “Enhancing the discoverability of data management plans with metadata schema”
• Hannah Olson- “WIN-WInternship: A Data-Focused Summer Project with Mutually Beneficial Outcomes for Both Mentor and Mentee”

 

There were many other impressive presentations throughout the symposium. There is a full list of the presentations and abstracts for you to look over. The presentations themselves are also on OSF.

This is my second time attending the SEDLS conference and I hope to attend again next year! Thank you to the committee for all of your hard work putting this conference together.