Blog on the Conul conference 2025: Shaping tomorrow, Reflections and new directions.

This review of the CONUL Conference 2025 is by John O'Donnell, who is a Library Assistant at the Glucksman Library, UL.

Thanks to the kind sponsorship of Bibliotheca, I had the opportunity to attend the CONUL Conference as a library assistant who qualified from an LAI accredited coarse in the last 5 years. The Conference took place in the Tullamore Court Hotel on the 28^th and 29^th of May. This was the first CONUL conference which I would have had the opportunity to attend so I was curious but also excited to find what the conference had in store for me.

The conference opened with the head librarians of the University of Limerick, Technological University Dublin, University of Galway and University College Dublin.  They discussed the opportunities and the threats faced by academic libraries within the current climate of which we work in.

The first of the keynote speakers was Richard Ovenden, who currently holds the title of Bodley’s Librarian & the Helen Hamlyn Director of the University Libraries, Richard comes from a special collections background. The keynote title was Collecting and preserving new imperatives and challenges. Collecting and preserving knowledge is important due to these uncertain times libraries are currently operating in. Throughout the keynote speech from Richard, he continued to stress the importance of collecting and preserving information.

After the first keynote speech, the breakout session which I attended was the lighting talk. In the lighting talk each talk revolved around Auditing digital collections for long term preservation, AI curious to AI conversant, Aligning Open repository Network, AI Literacy at UCD Library and Finally Trends in Open Access Publishing. I found these lightning talks helpful and informative as I currently work in the customer engagement side of the Glucksman Library I want to branch out and begin looking at different aspects of the work performed in academic libraries, such as AI, OA publishing, preserving collections and final the use of Open Repository networks to strengthen practices. These talks were very interesting and helped me further understand other aspects of the academic library which will overall help me in my understanding of what goes on in the day-to-day work within an academic library. After the lightning talk, that concluded the talks for the day. I then took the opportunity to go over and view some of the posters which had been done by members of other libraries around the country.

After all the events, I was given the opportunity to meet my Bursary Mentor, Elaine Harrington from UCC. We discussed the first day of the conference and what I had thought of the whole experience, from the keynote speaker to the lightning talks which I had also attended That concluded my first day at the CONUL conference.

On day two we had our talk from the second Keynote speaker Anne Jarvis, who is the current University Librarian in Princton University in the United States. Anne spoke about her professional experiences and focused on three primary three themes that she believes to be crucial to library leadership.  The three themes which she believes to be the most important are Partnership, Innovation, and Sustainability of Services.

After Anne’s talk, we then had the first break out session. I went to the feedback session of the Record Data Management (RDM) costing model. This session was presented by Armin Straube and Marcus Leaning from UL. The attendees were to view the process of good record data management standards and see if they could find any potential unforeseen costs within the data management plan. This was an informative session which helped me better understand the process required when creating a record data management plan. After that workshop I then attended a Parallel paper talk session from Jenny O Neill, Michaela Hollywood and Oksana Dereza. The three individual papers touched on the topic of Open Research, Reimagining the Library and Transforming text into discovery.

Being able to attend the Conul conference was an excellent experience for me as I only began my full time carrier in libraries in early 2024 so the conference was an amazing experience for me to attend so that I could, number 1, meet people within the field which I work in, and also to gain a better understanding of the work done, not only in the Glucksman library where I work but also other university Libraires around the country. To top it all off, I was fortunate enough to win the annual conference quiz- a highlight of the event.