This year's conference theme is Building a Culture of UX (User Experience) - a way to develop library services, spaces, and collections focused on our users. Our keynote speaker and workshop leader is Amy Deschenes, the Library User Experience Specialist at Harvard University.
Welcome to the 2017 Annual Conference and Business Meeting. Our theme is Assessing and Articulating our Impact: the Role of Academic Libraries in the Institution. In the pre-conference member survey, our members expressed interest in how to ensure that the role and value of the library in our institutions is understood and appreciated. Areas of interest include leadership skills, data collection and presentation, and tying data to institutional priorities, such as graduation rates, retention rates, and closing achievement gaps. The conference is on June 8 and 9 at the Hotel Northampton, in Northampton, Massachusetts. See below for the conference program.
Our keynote speaker is Adriene Lim. Dr. Lim is the Dean of Libraries and Philp H. Knight Chair at the University of Oregon. She has a Ph.D. in Library and Information Science from Simmons College and MLIS from Wayne State University. She was a 2015 Management and Leadership in Education Fellow at Harvard University, and a 2008 Leadership Fellow at the Frye Institute at Emory University. Her areas of Interest are in Organizational Development, Shared Leadership in a Unionized Environment, and Appreciative Inquiry / Scenario Planning. She has been an invited/juried panelist and presenter at library association conferences, including ACRL, LLAMA, Oregon Library Association, ALADN, and others. Her work is published in the Journal of Library Administration, Journal of Academic Librarianship, Information Technology and Libraries, Library Management, as well as book chapters. She is the recipient of many service, leadership, and process improvement awards. We are happy to welcome her and her wife Mary to their first visit to Western Massachusetts!
