2025 Lightning Talks Schedule

Virginia Cononie
Associate Librarian
Coordinator of Research Services - USC Upstate Library

5 AI Apps in 5 Minutes

This lightning talk aims to discuss 5 generative Ai apps that library professionals can use in both their professional and personal lives. A brief introduction to the technology, along with interesting information about the tool will be provided. Conversation around intellectual property rights and copyright protection will be interwoven within the presentation.

Charles Powell
Multimedia/Copyright Specialist
Colorado School of Mines

Pirates of the DMCA: Ideas for teaching copyright through story and song    

Stories and songs are great teaching tools by themselves, but creating stories and songs can take it a step further by offering the learner more opportunities for rich engagement. In this short talk, I plan to succinctly outline and compare two lesson plans that use songwriting and storytelling to help learners with copyright concepts including: Fair Use rap battles and using sea songs to teach online piracy. Attendees will be provided with a link to access the lesson plans to use or adapt.

Christy Urquieta Cortes
Strategist, Content & Scholarly Communication
Lyrais
 

A Tale as Old as Time: Fair Use, AI, and the Evolution of eResource Agreements

In this lightning talk I will be discussing my experience of licensing for fair use of electronic resources, specifically the effects of AI usage restrictions on fair use, with the Lyrasis library consortia. In the last two years, Academic Libraries and Library Consortia have become increasingly inundated with frustratingly restrictive AI use clauses in electronic resource agreements. Most of this language, at least as initially proposed, restricts any use of AI at all in connection with publisher and vendor products. Though we know that institutions and their users are using AI at increased rates and in tools that are embedded in regular use resources of the user community. This includes familiar applications in Microsoft products and Adobe, as well as in licensed research assistance resources that use AI to make the research process more intuitive. Inevitably, most of these products will come into contact with vendor and publisher content despite any such restrictions that may be placed on them, putting institutions at risk of being in automatic violation of material aspects of a license agreement upon signature. In this talk I will share my work and experiences in response to this current landscape of licensing AI in eResource agreements and how it affects my organization’s diverse member communities. This has included developing strategies to negotiate fair AI use language that is effective and actionable for all parties, as well as working to gain a deeper understanding of how to navigate vague or unreasonably restrictive AI clauses when they conflict with real world use cases.

Siyao Cheng  
PhD Candidate
School of Information Sciences University of Illinois- Urbana-Champaign    

Building Copyright Competency: Expert Evaluation of Lesson Plans Tailored for Library and Information Science Students    

Library and Information Science (LIS) students—many of whom will become future librarians—interact with copyright laws in various aspects of their everyday lives, including mundane, academic, and professional contexts. Particularly, in LIS students’ future jobs, they are expected to strike a careful balance between ensuring patrons’ free access to information and upholding the rights of copyright holders. Thus, their understanding of copyright law, and their ability to communicate about it, is essential. However, due to their lack of copyright education, many LIS students are underprepared to manage copyright-related materials and responsibilities in a legally and ethically sound manner. To address this gap in LIS copyright education, I designed ten copyright lesson plans as flexible tools for instructors to increase LIS students’ copyright knowledge through various formats. The project of developing proposed lesson plans is part of Library Copyright Institute fellowship and aims to achieve the following goals: 1) equip LIS students with the skills needed to fulfill their workplace duties, and 2) prepare them to instruct their future students at various academic levels about the importance and application of copyright in both academic and everyday contexts. This talk will briefly outline the process of creating the lesson plans and discuss their implications for addressing new copyright-related challenges that LIS students may face in their future careers.

Micah Zeller
WashU Libraries
Head of Scholarly Communication & Digital Publishing Services    

AI Confessions: Surfacing Hidden Innovation in Libraries    

Across libraries, staff members are quietly experimenting with AI tools to solve problems and handle routine tasks in creative and practical ways. Yet these innovations often remain hidden, creating missed opportunities for knowledge sharing and collective growth. This lightning talk will present real, anonymous insights from library staff about their day-to-day AI usage, collected through pre-conference surveying, to spark honest conversation about how we can better surface and evaluate emerging practices in this space. We’ll explore why solutions often remain siloed, how the rapid pace of technological change affects willingness to share experiences, and what happens when we lack clear guidance on AI tool usage. Do our efforts truly save time and add value? How might we better tap into the distributed expertise that exists throughout our organizations? By transforming these private experiments into public dialogue, this session aims to help libraries develop more transparent approaches to AI integration and building on each other’s work.

Yuanxiao Xu     
Copyright Attorney
Authors Alliance

What’s Up with the Librarian of Congress — and Why It Matters    

A quick dive into the current state of the Librarian of Congress: what’s happening, why libraries care, and why this matters for copyright policy and information access nationwide.