ALN conference 2025

We are pleased to announce that once again we're running our annual conference split between an online and an in-person day.

The online day will be held on Teams on 18 June 2025, and the in-person day will be at Manchester Metropolitan University on 11 July 2025.

Sustainable Innovation: moving forward in challenging times

We know our members are rising to the challenge of continuing to thrive whilst across the sector, finances and staff time is tight. How do we choose what to focus on, what to drop, and how we manage our teams to get them through difficult times? This conference asks how we might continue to move forward, to innovate, and to share the positive changes we’ve made in these challenging times. Further details of the conference theme and sub-themes can be found here. The call for papers is now closed and we expect to release the full programme late April.

Ticket prices and bookings - now open!

For presenters and early bird, bookings are discounted to £30 (online), £75 (in-person) for ALN members and £45 (online), £110 (in-person) for non-ALN members. Bulk discounts are available for 5 or more people attending in-person. See the Eventbrite page for fuller details. Bookings now open (from 17th March). After 11th May, early bird discounts are removed, so revert to £40 (online), £95 (in-person) for ALN members and £60 (online), £150 (in-person) for non-ALN members.

Sponsored places

We are offering 10 sponsored places for both presenters and delegates at ALN25. Sponsored places will cover attendance at both the online and in-person days, as well as provide a contribution towards travel costs for attending the in-person day. We are looking at offering the places to those who work in an ALN institution or are studying in the North of England for a relevant qualification, and we welcome applications from underrepresented population groups in the library community, and those who may otherwise have experienced barriers to attending.

If you are successful, you will be expected to produce a personal output within four weeks. This could be contributing to social media during the conference, producing a blog/vlog post summarising the sessions attended or another creative way of showcasing your experience that can be published on the ALN website.

To apply for one of the sponsored places, please email alnconferenceteam@gmail.com by Monday 14th April 2025. Use the email subject ‘ALN Sponsored Place Application’ and include the following information:

Your name, job title and name of the ALN institution you work for/study in.
Maximum 250 words on your anticipated learning outcomes of the conference, how you feel you will benefit from attending, and how you hope to put your learning into action.
Your suggested output for promoting/contributing to the conference - e.g. a blog post.
Whether you would like to attend the online day only, or the whole conference.

Keynotes

We are excited to announce our keynotes for our two days:

Helen Rimmer, owner of the Kind Brave Leader, will provide the keynote at our online day (Wednesday 18 June).

Kindness as a Catalyst: sustaining innovation and wellbeing in challenging times

When times are tough — when budgets tighten, workloads grow, and uncertainty looms — it’s easy to think kindness and wellbeing are luxuries we can’t afford. But what if they’re exactly what we need to not only get through but to thrive?

In this keynote, Helen Rimmer, founder of The Kind Brave Leader, invites us to rethink kindness as a powerful force for sustainable innovation in academic libraries. She’ll explore how simple, genuine acts of kindness can spark a ripple effect, strengthening wellbeing, fostering creativity, and helping teams navigate even the hardest days.

Helen will share her own journey alongside research and practical ideas you can take back to your library. She’ll also challenge the difficult things, like how to spot when organisations are “carewashing” (talking about wellbeing without really meaning it) and how we can create spaces where people feel safe, valued, and able to do their best work.

Expect to be part of the conversation, not just a listener. There’ll be moments for reflection, some simple but powerful exercises, and plenty of chances to connect with the heart of why you do what you do. In the face of rising demands and shrinking resources, kindness can be the catalyst that sustains not just our services, but our people.

Monica Westin, Associate Director Content & Discovery at Manchester Metropolitan University, will provide the keynote at our in-person day (Friday 11 July 2025)

The 10,000 year librarian: Radical sustainability for enduring knowledge

In times of upheaval, long-term thinking can feel daunting, if not impossible—yet few things matter more. Resisting reactive, short-term fixes to our current obstacles is essential to building a lasting future for knowledge. This talk proposes a new framework of “radical sustainability” for academic librarianship that challenges some of our core assumptions about our institutional work by asking how we can balance meeting our present organizational needs without compromising the ability of future generations to do the same. We will explore concrete strategies for building new types of information sustainability: long term financial and operational sustainability; technological sustainability, including anticipating and planning for widespread obsolescence; and social sustainability, including facilitating intergenerational knowledge transfer and fighting for a world where students and researchers of the future can meet their information needs. To do this, we need both profoundly agile mindsets that allow us to pivot, learn, and change— as well as new tools for preventing burnout and new types of institutional support for change management.

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