Health Sciences Perspective: Attending LOEX 2025
Submitted by: Kay Strahan
LOEX, an organization focused on library instruction and information literacy, hosts an annual conference yearly and provides quarterly publications to member libraries. This year, the annual conference was held in Pasadena, California, on May 15-17, 2025, and I attended after being accepted as a co-author on a presentation about faculty collaboration in the health sciences. This year’s theme was Crafting a Future for Information Literacy. This post describes my experience attending LOEX as a health sciences librarian and provides encouragement for more health sciences librarians involved in instruction to attend in the future.
The LOEX model is self-supporting and non-profit, meaning that no vendors attend the conference and vendor sponsorship is not utilized to support the organization. All members of LOEX are institutional, and in 2025, there were about 600 member libraries across the world. On their website, their mission statement reads, “LOEX is dedicated to the support and promotion of academic libraries, the development and continuing education of library personnel, and the promotion of information literacy through education and the exchange of ideas for the benefit of its members as well as the public.” Their annual conference boasted a full schedule across three days of collaborative conferencing. Their print schedule has a “track list” of categories themed to the conference. The track list contained six categories:
- Collaboration and Outreach: Stitching Us Together
- Research and Assessment: Shaping Our Practice
- Advocacy and Justice: Paving Our Path
- Frontiers and Innovation: Forging Our Future
- Teaching and Learning: Honing Our Craft
- Stewardship and Leadership: Weaving Our Strengths
Each breakout session was categorized into one of these tracks to assist attendees in navigating their sessions. Each time block lasted 50 minutes, and there were six sessions occurring simultaneously. There were many decisions to make every hour, but presenting at LOEX is so competetive that I know every session would have been very interesting and informative. Each session had an “intended audience” marker, indicating whether the session was for total beginners to the topic or if it would benefit someone with at least some experience with the topic.
There were two categories of breakout session: presentation and interactive workshop. The presentations worked very similarly to an MLA paper session, but each presenter got a full 50 minutes of presentation time. The interactive sessions were very similar to immersion sessions at MLA, and they too were limited to 50 minutes. I left every interactive session wishing we had more time. The first session I attended was an interactive workshop on building dynamic library programs by utilizing our own interests and hobbies. In that session alone I planned five outreach programs that I can implement at my institution this fall. I attended another interactive workshop on the second day where the presenters showcased their curriculum toolkit for combating mis- and disinformation. I left that session with several lesson plans that can be tweaked for my institution and my needs.
The open sharing of information at this conference was unparalleled. It was relatively small – about the size of an MLA Chapter conference – and I kept seeing the same people over and over. It was great to continue conversations between sessions, at lunch, and at dine-arounds in the city. Since the focus of the conference was on teaching and information literacy in librarianship, it was great to build those instruction connections outside of the health sciences and expand some of my horizons.
Speaking of horizon expansion, the plenary speaker was Dr. Alison J. Head, founder and director of Project Information Literacy (PIL), a nonprofit focused on collective data examining how young adults interact with information. Her talk was titled “Information Literacy at a Critical Crossroads: Looking Backward to Move Forward,” where she examined data from PIL to curate information agency among librarians moving forward in these unprecedented times. I took over a page of notes, some of them quips from Dr. Head, but most of them were very interesting observations on the current student landscape and how libraries and information literacy play into their lives in the digital age. Some of what Dr. Head spoke about were things I have observed, but having the PIL data to back up my observations was very validating.
Overall, attending LOEX 2025 in Pasadena was one of the best conference experiences I have ever had. The people were fabulous, the venue was accessible, and the content was engaging and relevant to my practice. I ran into a few health sciences librarians at LOEX this year, so I know I’m not the only one to have gone, but I do hope to attend more LOEX annual conferences in the future and I hope to encourage fellow health sciences librarians who are involved in instruction and information literacy to submit and attend if possible. The conference proceedings should be on the LOEX website soon, so check it out if you have a chance: https://www.loex.org/conferences.php.