Lightning Talks 2026

I incorporate active learning in my sessions and looked forward to bringing this best practice into my new position when I started working with larger classes. I usually used tools such as Padlet to encourage students to answer open-ended questions about the library, their assignment, and what they wanted out of the session. This gave me a chance to see what ideas the students are coming into the class with, and provided the students who may not feel comfortable raising their hands a chance to ask questions in an anonymous format. The safe space to ask questions without having to speak in front of the group becomes more pronounced as class sizes grows (in entry level STEM classes, class size can get up to 300) particularly when many students are first-generation, minority, or underrepresented populations. The first few times I used my usual activities in the large classes, the timing didn’t work; I spent three times as long going through responses, even combining similar questions, before moving onto the prepared exercise, which then had to be shortened or skipped. I tried to pivot to traditional large class tools like PollEverywhere, but I didn’t like the closed-answer only options. So I developed a way of soliciting some structured free answer responses with the closed-ended questions. Another consideration while adapting this, I need the basic lesson plan to work for the orientation level class for the larger majors like biology and chemistry (300) and the smaller majors like earth science (10-12) students. 

The Research Data Services team in University of Virginia's Science & Engineering Library teaches workshops every semester focused on learning technical skills. We have offered workshops on topics in various programming languages for years and recently are offering repeat sessions with new content focused on incorporating Generative AI tools into the programming workflow, as well as new sessions specifically focused on leveraging AI tools with programming skills. This presentation will be a quick overview of how we do this, what caveats to look out for, next steps, and where to go for more resources.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2026. This presentation will highlight its evolution, global impact, and the pivotal role science librarians in special libraries and academic institutions have played in shaping its success. Over the past two decades, BHL has established itself as the world’s largest open-access digital library dedicated to biodiversity literature, providing free and enduring access to over 60 million pages of scientific knowledge—including rare foundational works in taxonomy, primary sources like field guides, and present-day scholarly literature about our natural world.

This session will explore the BHL’s collaborative framework, highlighting how libraries and librarians worldwide have contributed to its development through digitization, metadata enrichment, and user engagement. We will share some innovations such as scientific name searching and our efforts to diversify the collection by including perspectives historically underrepresented in science. This presentation will also highlight our future direction, as a data driven backbone of other biodiversity platforms.

Attendees will learn how BHL content is being used in research and how librarians can deepen their involvement, whether by contributing collections, sharing this resource with researchers and students, or participating in future collaborative initiatives.

Marking 20 years of impact, this presentation celebrates BHL not just as a digital library, but as a key component of biodiversity data infrastructure. Join us in honoring the past and looking ahead to the next chapter in open biodiversity scholarship and data.

Data sonification is the aural counterpart to the established field of data visualization. By representing data as audio, practitioners can unearth unique insights and communicate phenomena to their audience in novel ways. While academic libraries often cultivate data visualization expertise via functional specialists and dedicated units, sonification is comparatively absent in the profession.

In this talk, the presenter will discuss a recent event held at Stanford University Libraries in which the Science and Engineering Resource Group partnered with the Center for Computer Research in Musical Acoustics to host its Ensemble for Sonification of Temporal Data for a public performance. The talk will conclude with recommendations for other academic librarians looking to promote institutional data sonification work, including where to look for practitioners and logistical insights.

Science librarians increasingly serve patrons who work with evolving computational tools that both mirror those used for working with written text and have enabled scientific breakthroughs. Computationally, tokens from Shakespeare (whether words, phrases, or individual letters) were treated similarly to tokens from DNA (whether amino acid sequences or nucleotide bases). These algorithms, whether applied to genes or text, responded to the same historical developments from the 1990s to the mid-2010s.

This lightning talk will look at the transition in computational science from tools that fueled the Human Genome Project to ones that were used to find hidden patterns in fields like comparative genetics. This transition consisted of two technologies: linked data ontologies developed by librarians and scholars like the Gene Ontology and WordNet; and vector-based algorithms like DNA2vec and word2vec that built models using machine learning. We’ll avoid math, technical jargon, and code in favor of diagrams alongside short, easy to understand explanations of this transition. 

Having earned a PhD in history, I believe that understanding the narrative of technological developments can help us serve library patrons and users. Recognizing how science algorithms developed alongside text algorithms will help attendees understand why graph databases, vector databases and high performance computing became more important in laboratories and libraries, especially data archives. Broadly knowing the how and why of this transition can help a science librarian anticipate patron needs, give more applicable consultations, and effectively advocate for them within today’s and tomorrow’s library.

What does Albert Einstein, a negative hydrogen ion cyclotron, and an eight-meter domed planetarium have in common? No, this isn’t the start of a witty joke; they are all connected to the University of Manitoba.  

In my lightning talk, I will present a very brief—but very fascinating—history of the science and engineering faculties at the University of Manitoba (Winnipeg, Canada). Founded in 1877 as the first university in Western Canada, the University of Manitoba is a member of Canada’s U15, the equivalent to the US’ Ivy League and the UK’s Russell Group. But who has heard of this renowned university, out in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in the longitudinal centre of Canada’s Great White North? Yes, it’s cold here, but our history is smokin’ hot.

CAS SciFinder®'s tool for defining fragments in the structure editor is a powerful way to explore chemical structure variations by allowing users to search multiple structures that share a common core at one time. When you don't want to search these structures individually or page through substructure results looking for the right one(s), the fragment tool could streamline your structure search. We'll walk through a real time example showing how to draw separate fragments, assign attachment points, and then explore the results, leaving you empowered to better assist researchers tackle complex chemical structure queries!

How does a Catholic, Jesuit institution come to have an 80% medical school acceptance rate, a famous Tiktok chemist, and a complex named after Anthony Fauci? The long history between the Jesuits and science might surprise you! This presentation will touch upon prominent Jesuit and Jesuit-educated scientists and their substantial contributions to the field, as well as a forthcoming research guide designed to highlight these interdisciplinary connections for our undergraduate, liberal arts community.

Undergraduate STEM courses are often composed of a wide array of students, including STEM majors as well as non-STEM majors fulfilling degree requirements. Non-STEM majors often arrive with varying levels of interest and understanding of scientific concepts. This diverse composition often poses a unique challenge for librarians leading one-shot information literacy sessions and aiming to connect meaningfully with every student. This talk will explore strategies and practical approaches designed to motivate and support non-STEM students in undergraduate STEM classes.

This presentation explores the life and work of Edgar Sharp McFadden, a pioneering agriculturalist credited with developing several rust-resistant wheat varieties, including “Hope Wheat”, which helped save an estimated 25 million people globally from starvation. Late 19th century Dakota Territory was characterized by abundant wheat harvests, with more than one-million acres of productive fields. In 1897, Eureka, SD, a rail-point for farms within a 75 mile-radius, shipped two-thirds of the world’s wheat. This bountiful era was cut short in 1904 when an epidemic of stem rust began to devastate global wheat crops and production in the Dakota Territory fell by 50 percent. Edgar Sharp McFadden, having witnessed the devastating effect of stem rust on wheat crops from Texas to Minnesota, set out to develop a variety of wheat immune to stem rust and scab. His breakthroughs in wheat genetics resulted in a spring wheat variety known as “Hope Wheat”. This development set the stage for increased global wheat production, saved millions of lives from starvation, and paved the way for the Green Revolution. This presentation highlights McFadden’s scientific methodology, the agricultural challenges of the time, and the long-lasting impact of his work while simultaneously reframing E.S. McFadden not merely as a regional agronomist, but as a figure of global significance in the history of crop science.

Chemistry librarians and chemists might be familiar with the names of Beilstein and Gmelin. However, their lives and how they composed these two influential chemistry handbooks have not been well discussed. In this presentation, I will briefly introduce their careers and works, and what contents of these two handbooks are covered in Reaxys, a key chemistry database. The history of these two earliest chemistry handbooks will inform chemical information professionals of their values about 150 and 200 years after they first came out.

James D. Dana is a historical figure in geology and mineralogy who lived from 1813-1895. Early in his life he was a student of Asa Gray, who would later become a well-known botanist, and was also a student under Benjamin Silliman, the founder of the American Journal of Science. When Dana was in his 20’s he sailed on a U.S. Navy expedition as the official mineralogist, and later became a professor at Yale. Over his lifetime he corresponded with other major figures in the history of science including Berzelius, Lyell, Agassiz, and Darwin. He was very prolific, authoring hundreds of scientific articles, and of interest to librarians, a number of book series on mineralogy, which continued to be updated after his death. One such series is ‘The System of Mineralogy’, that contains a mineral classification scheme he devised, in which each mineral is assigned a number, as a sort of unique ID. As new minerals were discovered and known minerals were reclassified, the scheme necessarily needed to be updated. He himself wrote, and rewrote ‘The System of Mineralogy’ up to the 5th edition, his son Edward S. Dana wrote the 6th edition; and the most recent edition, the 8th is from 1997. The classification system has parallels to the more familiar CAS registry numbers for chemicals. The works of this historical figure continue to endure as valuable resources for researchers and library collections in the modern day.

The history of health science in the west is fraught with excesses of white, cisgender figures of authority, underrepresentation of marginalized identities, and the assumption of an objective and singular truth to be learned and applied. Even today, much of the literature is written by and focused on practitioners of a biomedical approach to health, heavily emphasizing a separation of the learner from their topic of study. Sentipensante pedagogy, as conceptualized by Laura Rendón, proposes space to challenge shared assumptions, leading to a holistic education that emphasizes diversity, multiculturalism, and justice. Within health sciences, there is a need for an education concerned with the whole person, and often misconceptions about the role of bias in topic selection and research. In this talk, Sentipensante pedagogy is applied in a health science library context, with cases for practical application in reference, instruction, and collections contexts, from the presenter's personal experience.

Placed-based education (PBE) is a term for teaching practices that focus on experiential learning within a specific community and context and commonly applied in lessons related to ecology or the local environment. There is a prevailing emphasis in PBE towards in-person field work, but virtual storytelling software also serves as a valuable tool for shaping and sharing the story of a place. Digital story-maps have the capacity to incorporate images, documents, and media to tell unique stories not possible through field visits alone and can assist with strengthening the connection between urban and suburban communities and their surrounding natural features and ecosystems. This is especially true when the natural features are well known locally or are otherwise iconic within their communities. 

The Red Cedar River is an icon of the Michigan State University campus, yet many in the campus and community misunderstand the river and consider it damaged, polluted, and even dangerous. This lightning talk describes how a librarian has created virtual place-based educational objects that tell a more complete story of the river’s history and relationship with MSU. This form of virtual storytelling can aid in shaping an individual’s connection to and sense of place, leading to increased civic engagement and feelings of care and responsibility for the river within community members.

My role as a new science librarian is to work closely with students and faculty to ensure library collections and services meet evolving information needs, and my outreach to faculty will be done by conducting email introductions, attending department meetings, or informal meet-and-greet events. I have developed posters offering the following sessions that I would like to share with librarians to use as they need on:

+Introduction to Databases: Guiding students in using subject-specific databases effectively.

+Research Skills Workshops: Teaching students how to develop effective search strategies.

+Literature Review Basics: Helping graduate students and researchers navigate systematic review processes.

+Data Literacy and Management: Introducing best practices for handling and sharing research data (data visualization).

These posters provide clear, concise messaging that explains who I am and how I can save faculty time and strengthen their students' research skills. These sessions can be customized based on course goals or faculty requests.

Through the communication of library resources and services, I would like to highlight that critical information literacy can be applied in STEM education to help students critically evaluate scientific information, recognize the socio-political contexts of research, and make informed, ethical decisions.

The South Side Science Festival is yearly youth focused outreach event sponsored by our university to connect to residents in our part of the city.  The university sits in the middle of a mixed raced area with a diverse range of income levels, and the festival is open to the entire community. The event includes tables offering interactive demos and other activities by students, staff, and local organizations and also sessions with scientists on STEM related topics. For the past three years, our science librarians have staffed a table to promote science information services and resources to festival goers that will appeal to both young and old. We provide handouts and demos of science related resources.  We also offer multiple craft activities of interest to children. In this talk we will discuss what specifically we offer, which of our offerings have been most popular with children as well as adults, and our plans for future festivals.

Curriculum mapping is an underutilized tool that can solve a number of problems. Our project involved two subject librarians at a large public university who used it to identify significant overlaps between two departments while looking to hand off responsibilities. Throughout the process, we were able to determine where instruction was happening and get a visual representation of where it wasn’t. The project goals were to document current work, enhance outreach, simplify faculty transitions, and to allocate resources efficiently. In addition, we were able to enhance our impact by identifying outcomes and mapping current library instruction. This presentation will provide our methods of creating the map along with examples and reflections to help others create or enhance curriculum maps as a tool for their own programs or departments.