Mercian 2025 Conference: Resilience, Relevance, and Reach: Libraries making an impact! (#Mercian25) 

Mercian 25 is a vibrant, friendly event for higher education libraries staff at a Mercian Collaboration member institution. Mercian 25 offers opportunities for networking and meeting colleagues, hearing new ideas and visiting other institutions.

#Mercian25 on X

#Mercian25 on Bluesky

Date and venue

The conference will be held in person, Wednesday 10th September 2025, at the Techno Centre, Coventry University Technology Park.

Eligibility and delegate bookings

Booking Form
Opens: 10 July 2025
Closes: 13 August 2025

Important:

• • Everyone attending (delegates, speakers, sponsors) must complete the booking form.
  • Attendance is free for library staff in a Mercian Collaboration member institution.
  • Each university gets 3 delegate places, not including presenters. Extra requests or bookings from non-members will go on a waiting list.

New Delegate Travel Bursary pilot scheme available!

We are launching a new Delegate Travel Bursary scheme to support potential delegates and member institutions as follows:

• Gaining individual Continuing Professional Development (CPD) experience by attending and participating in the annual conference.
• Recognising and mitigating barriers to attendance, such as additional costs incurred due to using accessible transportation.
• Providing CPD opportunities and mitigating training and development costs. Apply through the booking form.
• Full terms are here: Mercian Collaboration Delegate Travel Bursary scheme

Conference themes

We know that the Mercian Collaboration members and the wider sector are facing significant challenges, not least in terms of staffing, resources, and funding. We want to recognise these realities, focus on what libraries and library staff are doing to meet these challenges, and explore opportunities for positive change and new ideas and approaches.

Conference Programme

The outline conference programme is available here: Mercian 2025 Programme

More detail will be added to the programme as soon as possible.

Keynote – Dr Beth Montague-Hellen, Head of Library & Information Services at The Francis Crick Institute

Mercian 25’s keynote speaker is the inspirational Dr Beth Montague-Hellen. Beth has recently authored “Practical Tips for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in Libraries”, Facet, September, 2024, which has been well-received and seems more important than ever.

Beth started off academic life as a Molecular Biologist studying at Manchester University. The next 14 years were spent as a bioinformatician, accruing an MSc and a PhD on the way.

Following this, Beth decided that supporting others to do excellent research was far more rewarding than actually doing the research and so moved into Libraries and Research Support. Beth takes an as open-as-possible, EDI focused approach to research support and is a big advocate for green OA alongside a completely transparent research cycle including radically open data and software sharing.

Our Sponsors

Mercian 25 is funded by sponsorship from publishers and library suppliers. Our sponsors are a key part of the event, exhibiting and participating in person throughout the day. Without their support Mercian 25 would not be possible.

• Platinum sponsor – AM Digital 
• Gold sponsors – Bloomsbury, Brown’s Books, Burgundy Information Services Ltd., Clarivate, Coherent Digital, EBSCO, Gale Cengage, OCLC, Overton, Prenax, Taylor & Francis, and Third Iron. 
• Silver sponsor – Reassurance Security Services. 
• We also gratefully acknowledge the Open Book Collective, which has confirmed Gold-level support as a community-led, not-for-profit open access supporter. 

We offer a range of sponsorship options and opportunities. If you are interested in becoming a sponsor for this year or at a future conference, please get in touch via mercianconference@gmail.com.

Call for posters

Our ‘Call for Posters‘ is now closed.

We will exhibit a range to posters from member libraries at the Conference to showcase recent research, projects, and special interests.

Call for speakers 

Our ‘Call For Speakers’ is now closed.

Speakers are staff from member libraries presenting and discussing their work, priorities, and initiatives, in line with conference themes. We especially encourage proposals from new speakers, who gain valuable experience of presenting at a professional conference.

More information will continue to be added to this website as it becomes available

We look forward to you attending, speaking and being a part of the conference on the day.

If you have any questions, please email mercianconference@gmail.com

Updated 10th July 2025

Photo credit: Coventry Conferences