ARL Membership Meeting, Spring 2015

I recently attended the spring 2015 Association of Research Libraries (ARL) membership meeting, held at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley, CA, April 28-30, 2015. It's been a while since I attended an ARL meeting as a member of the ARL Research Libraries Leadership Fellows Program in 2007-2008. While I was in that program I attended ARL meetings in St. Louis, Coral Gables, and Washington, D.C. The Coral Gables meeting included a memorable dinner at the home of Donna Shalala, President of the University of Miami. This time I was looking forward to participating as an official delegate (filling in for my boss, Mary Casserly), and also to meeting the current group of leadership fellows, some of whom I know from ALA or past positions.

The first day of the membership meeting was mostly dedicated to the work of the Association. ARL had in recent years undertaken a strategic planning initiative, which resulted in a report that charted their new direction: Report of the Association of Research Libraries Strategic Thinking and Design Initiative. Discussion revolved around future directions including a focus on leadership development, collections, innovation, libraries that learn, and libraries as scholarly communication engines. Committees will be smaller and include Advocacy and Public Policy, Assessment; Diversity; and Membership Engagement and Outreach.

Highlights of the meeting for me were the invited speakers and panelists. William C. Kirby (Harvard University) gave a presentation on "A Chinese Century? The World of Universities and Information in the 21st Century." Brian Nosek (University of Virginia, and Executive Director, Center for Open Science) presented on his efforts to support open scholarship as well as common practices regarding transparency, accuracy, sharing, reproducibility, and more. Panels addressed both copyright and shared print repositories. Finally, ARL and SPARC staff provided a series of updates on their advocacy and policy efforts. I had to catch my flight home so I unfortunately missed the last panel, which was on data science and supporting new research methods.

Aside from these substantive programs and panels, ARL membership meetings include introductions of new member delegates and tributes to retiring delegates. UCs Berkeley and Davis hosted a reception at the Morrison Library the first evening, and there was another reception held at the Claremont on the second evening. Overall, I found the meeting to be very stimulating and I have pages of notes that I want to follow up on later.