Announcing our 2025 Conference

Submitted by Executive Officer on Thu, 2025-03-06 10:09
By: 
Executive Officer

Conference announcement

We are pleased to announce the Mercian Collaboration’s Annual Conference “Mercian 25: Resilience, Relevance, and Reach: Libraries making an impact!”

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.

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.

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.

We thank our confirmed sponsors so far:

  • Platinum sponsors - AM Digital
  • Gold sponsors - Brown’s Books, Burgundy Information Services Ltd., Clarivate, EBSCO, Gale Cengage, OCLC, Taylor & Francis,  and Wiley.
  • Silver - To be confirmed.

We offer a range of sponsorship options and opportunities; full details will be available via our upcoming ‘Call For Sponsors’. In the meantime, 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 papers

Our 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.

  • Full details will be available with the ‘Call For Papers’, to be announced shortly.

 

Eligibility and delegate bookings

To attend Mercian 25, you must be higher education libraries staff at a Mercian Collaboration member institution. We do not charge for delegate bookings.

  • Booking link to be announced shortly

 

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

 

Updated 06/03/2025

Photo credit: Andy Calvert, University of Warwick