Last week, I attended the 2025 Charleston Conference in South Carolina, which brings together a wide range of librarians, publishers, and vendors to learn from one another and discuss issues affecting the world of academic libraries and scholarly research.
Lorcan Dempsey's opening keynote address, Libraries, librarianship and cross-LAMination, expertly set the tone for the week's proceedings. During his talk, Dempsey drew on his background as a librarian, teacher, and library consultant to share how libraries are increasingly dynamic organizations. Many libraries, both public and academic, have shifted from a singular focus on building collections to a community and relational focus.
While libraries certainly still have a role to play in knowledge sharing, today's libraries are going above-and-beyond their original mission to become places that respond to the social and cultural needs of the places in which they are located. Dempsey spoke about how libraries, museums, and archives (LAM) all have a role to play in the evolving needs of today's society.
This is certainly true at the Vanderbilt Television News Archive. While our core focus is still on recording and preserving national news broadcasts, as well as maintaining and enhancing discoverability of the collection, we have also been responding to the needs of society by focusing more of our work on engaging with the Vanderbilt campus community and beyond. For example, several of our staff members, have engaged with the Vanderbilt Libraries Buchanan Fellowship program.
Through this fellowship, Vanderbilt undergraduates work with library staff members on a semester-long project in experiential projects to gain hands-on experience working on library projects. Archive staff members have helped with fellowship projects utilizing the collection to analyze media coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Presidency, higher education, and even the commercials shown during the national evening news. These projects have culminated in both physical and digital exhibits open to the public.
Over the course of the conference, I attended different panel sessions to learn from other librarians about the issues facing their libraries. The most present theme across the conference was how academic librarians are incorporating AI tools into their workflows, as well as helping students and faculty think through issues regarding accuracy, transparency, and reliability using these tools. Many of the conference speakers reflected on the need for staff members at libraries and archives to serve as both sources of guidance in this new information age, as well as continue to build and maintain our collections to serve our communities as trusted repositories of information.
Again, this rings true at the Vanderbilt Television News Archive: while we are working to incorporate AI tools to automate some of the processes necessary for increasing access and discoverability in the collection, we are also aware that providing a trusted repository of television newscasts recorded off-the-air for use in research and scholarship is our core mission. As a first-time attendee of The Charleston Conference, I am looking forward to attending again in the future and connecting with others in the industry about the challenges and opportunities facing libraries and archives.