The Stanford University Libraries and the School of Engineering hosted the 2014 STELLA (Science, Technology and Engineering Library Leaders in Action) Unconference on April 25-26 in the Mackenzie Room of the Huang Engineering Center.  Sixty-five librarians from the US and Canada participated in this third STELLA Unconference.  

Our keynote speaker was Mehran Sahami, Professor and Associate Chair for Education in the Computer Science Department at Stanford. Prior to teaching, Sahami was a Senior Research Scientist at Google.  Professor Sahami’s talk was about the mathematical structures required for search retrieval to find similar terms and concepts with similar or dissimilar names. 

Unconference session topics were proposed by the participants and included outreach and liaison to students and faculty, new service models, library spaces, maker spaces, digital signage, video tutorials and protocols and the usual heated discussions on journal pricing and e-book packages. 

Interspersed with the topic sessions were poster session presentations and tours of Branner Earth Sciences Library and the Geospatial Center, the Stanford Libraries Digitization Labs, the create:space in Meyer and Room 36 in Huang.  

Notes and summaries from the sessions, poster session abstracts and the slides from the keynote speech will be posted on the STELLA wordpress site.

Helen Josephine,  STELLA 2014, co-organizer