Reimagining Openness in Academic Libraries
Sponsored by 
Online on 24th June 2026 with
in person on 6th July 2026 at the Dalton Building, Manchester Metropolitan University.
Slides, Recordings and reflections
Thanks to everyone who attended our conference whether it was the online day on Wednesday 24 June 2026, the in-person on Monday 6 July 2026 or both. The slides are now available (online and in person). Please note some slides are large and some are created in different software so you may need to download them in order to view.
We have now completed the checking and editing of recordings to ensure they are all accessible and they are now available on our Conference 2026 playlist on YouTube.
We awarded 13 sponsored places this year and these are the thoughts and reflections from the successful attendees.
Programme
Many thanks to all those who have submitted a proposal for our #ALN26 programme. The programme is available, highlighting our speakers and titles of papers along with abstracts.
Keynotes
Stephen Pinfield is Professor of Information Services Management at the University of Sheffield and Senior Research Fellow at the Research on Research Institute (RoRI) and will be providing our keynote for the online day on the 24th of June 2026. He has a particular interest in scholarly communication, open research and research evaluation. He has been involved in national and international policy development in these areas, and the creation of open systems and services since the early 2000s. His work takes place at the interface between theory and practice, stemming from his practice-based experience. Before becoming an academic in 2012, he was an information professional, latterly Chief Information Officer at the University of Nottingham, where he managed library and IT services. At Nottingham, he was the founding Director of Sherpa from 2002 to 2012, an initiative managing projects and providing services to support the global open access community (now run as part of Jisc Open Policy Finder).
Stephen’s keynote title was: Effective and Equitable Global Open Access. You can see Stephen’s abstract here.
Caroline Ball is the Community Engagement Lead for the Open Book Collective, a charity working to bring together open access book publishers, publishing service providers, and libraries to work toward a sustainable future for open access books. Her previous roles include academic librarian, copyright and licensing advisor, and lecturer in publishing, as well as voluntary work as co-founder of the #ebookSOS campaign. She is also an active Wikipedian, was awarded the UK Wikimedian of the Year award in 2020, and currently serves on the Wikimedia UK board of trustees. Her research interests centre on knowledge equity, information ethics, and systemic barriers and biases in dominant knowledge systems. We are delighted that Caroline delivered our keynote for the in person day.
Caroline’s keynote title is: Open Access and Its Blind Spots: Rethinking Access, Legitimacy, and Knowledge. You can see Caroline’s abstract here.
Sponsors
We are working with new and returning sponsors who have supported the conference in recent years.
We have secured our venue for next year, so if you’d like to find out more at this stage, please get in touch for #ALN27
If are interested in sponsoring the conference, please get in touch with us at alnconferenceteam@gmail.com
Platinum: Kortext.
Gold in person: Bibliotheca
Silver: Our Silver sponsors were: ACS Publications, Cambridge University Press, OCLC, Taylor & Francis and The Social History Archive.
Competition Prizes:
The following prizes were kindly gifted to us:
A box of cupcakes from Kortext, a £25 Amazon voucher from OCLC, two books by Stephen Pinfield from Taylor and Francis, a £50 Bookshop.org voucher from ACS and the book The Strategic Positioning of Academic Libraries from Facet Publishing.
Social Media
During the conference we used #ALN26 on the following platforms:
Bluesky: @academiclibsnorth.bsky.social
Instagram: @academiclibrariesnorth
LinkedIn: Academic Libraries North: Posts | LinkedIn
Ticket Prices
BOOKINGS FOR #ALN26 ARE NOW CLOSED
Sponsored places
We offered sponsored places for both presenters and delegates at #ALN26 to cover attendance at both the online and in-person days, as well as provide a contribution towards travel costs (up to £80) for attending the in-person day. We offered the places to those who work in an ALN institution or are studying in the North of England for a relevant qualification and welcomed applications from underrepresented population groups in the library community, and those who may otherwise have experienced barriers to attending.
Successful candidates were expected to produce a personal output within four weeks of the conference close (for example, 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).
The process originally closed on the 29th April and after receiving seven submissions we extended the deadline to the 18th May. We have now awarded thirteen sponsored places. The reflections and outputs from the sponsored places from this year can be found on our Sway.
Our Call for Papers has now closed!
We invited submissions exploring any aspect of the topic and in the following formats: Workshops (in person day only), Short papers, Lightning Talks, Panel Discussion, or even a Wild Card format! We welcomed submissions from all colleagues working within any institution, whether they are ALN member institutions or not. We encouraged submissions from those looking to present for the first time and we particularly welcomed submissions from people belonging to under-represented and marginalised communities and sectors, including but not limited to global majority and UK ethnic minorities, LGBTQIA+, those with disabilities and those who are neurodivergent.
Further details of the conference theme and sub-themes can be found here. We also created this resource to support those when developing a proposal. This is aimed in particular at first-time presenters.
The proposal submission form closed on the 13th of March 2026, this included a short set of questions, which were combined to form an abstract.