By Brandyn Whitaker
2024 BRASS Student Travel Award Winner
Brandyn Whitaker is the recipient of the 2024 BRASS Student Travel Award sponsored by SimplyAnalytics and here is what this award means to him in his own words.
Attending the 2024 ALA conference was an unforgettable and amazing experience. I cannot thank SimplyAnalytics enough for sponsoring the award and a special shoutout to Steven Swartz and Juan Vasquez who made me feel right at home when visiting the SimplyAnalytics booth. I am delighted to join the echelon of librarians who have added the SimplyAnalytics socks to their wardrobe! I also want to thank the BRASS Award Committee and in general the BRASS community which was extremely welcoming and helped make my conference experience a great one.
ALA 2024 was by far the largest conference I have ever attended, which was equal parts exciting and a little daunting. The exhibitor hall alone was a maze of booths and vendors. I left the conference with a mountain of books, an equally large pile of tote bags, and a much better perspective on the current state of library vendors and innovations being worked on.
Before arriving at the convention I had two main goals, one as a current student and one as a current employee at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s Career, Business, and Nonprofit department. As a student I am personally very interested in AI as an emerging technology and its role within libraries. For this interest I attended panels such as, “Breaking Boundaries: Harnessing the Power of Artificial Intelligence and ChatGPT to Transform Library Services” and “Generative Artificial Intelligence, Libraries, and The People They Serve: A Guided Discussion” just to name two. These panels reassured me that I was by no means alone in my careful excitement for AI’s use moving forward. While it was helpful to get some initial ideas, the guided discussion panel showcased that this is a topic where everyone is very much still trying to get their footing. In true student fashion, I left these discussions with a long list of articles and resources to dive into as personal homework. In the exhibit hall I was able to talk to vendors, both familiar and new, to learn about how AI integration was going to look like for their platform. While sometimes this meant learning about a tool my library or school didn’t have access to, I was also elated to learn that JSTOR’s AI beta is free to sign up for as long as your library or university has an account, a tool I immediately started exploring once I was home!
My goal for my department and as an award winner was to learn more about business librarianship at different libraries and to find out information that I could bring back to my colleagues and patrons. The BRASS Discussion Group was my first foray, and I came away with a newfound understanding of the state of data access and databases within business librarianship. It was wonderful to see the passion of librarians across this field, even as they noted serious concerns about vendor transparency and the loss of access to data occurring across the field. It was also great to hear about some of the amazing work being done across the country by other award winners as well as tools being worked on by BRASS committee members. The New Business Librarians Group was a great follow-up and between this and the BRASS Dinner, I was able to get almost an overwhelming amount of very helpful advice for a career in this field.
As far as what I brought back to my department and library, I would say that one of the most valuable pieces of information was learning about what new, or at least new to our system, services and databases are being offered. Juan has already hosted a fantastic demo of SimplyAnalytics capabilities for my department and I was also able to take back information about BlueCareer by EBSCO which we hope to demo and research further as well. As someone just getting started in the field of library science and business librarianship, this award was an unbelievable opportunity to open my eyes to the field at large and to make connections with librarians across the country.
