This innovative and forward-thinking library CEO shares her secrets to becoming a role model for libraries around the world. She discusses how the roles of librarians and libraries are changing to be community leaders and change agents. Librarians are the new superheroes - developing new toolkits, skills, and relationships to facilitate positive change in their communities. We can change the world by working with our communities and helping make them better places to live, work, learn, and play. 

Our discussions begin with the big-picture global perspective, move to the local community view, and are followed by table interactive discussions.

This panel of leaders shares how they are dealing with changes in the world as well as their strategies, practices, and plans for the future. Lots of time is set aside for audience interaction and discussion.

Summit sponsors share their insights of trends and practices as well as strategies for future proofing libraries.

Collections are a critical asset of libraries and are in continually changing formats. Join the discussion around e-resources vs. print, multimedia, open access, intellectual property, self-publishing, repositories, curating, pricing and financing, and more. A longtime champion for ebooks in libraries, de Castell talks about the ebook journey and her visions for the future. She looks at what has been accomplished; what we’re seeing now; emphasizes the need to focus in the future, for instance, on self-published ebooks: balancing access and a healthy creative industry, and re-establishing our role as curators and trusted sources for recommendations. And, of course, easy technology.

This panel addresses another key asset of libraries— staff! It covers continuous learning, customer service, hiring skills, outsourcing processes, succession planning, and more. Make sure your future is sustainable with the right expertise for your community.

Join us for tasty bites and drinks as we celebrate the grand opening of the 2017 Computers in Libraries Exhibition. Featuring leading-edge companies, the exhibition offers visitors a choice of products in all aspects of library technology, including web-based products and services, integrated library and information systems, online services, document delivery services, and more.

In her research on the digital culture, author Patricia Martin defines the top priorities essential to a successful transformation for libraries looking to thrive in the 21st century. Surprising and sometimes seismic, she explores the shifts that are about to rock the culture and how libraries can emerge even stronger.

Our speaker shares his insights about the future and discusses the key areas for libraries to focus their attention. He also participates in an interactive discussion with the audience. Bring your tech concerns and discuss them with colleagues.

This session looks at the elephants on the table and other prickly topics that we like to avoid facing, and therefore solving. Be ready to have an honest conversation and feel uncomfortable, but also to get some insights for addressing tough issues and decisions.

Go one-on-one with morning keynote, Patricia Martin, CEO, Litlamp Communications.

Change is hard—how can we do it better? Learn from a long-time practitioner in the museum and tech industries who shares models, strategies and recommendations for creating dynamic organizations that can deal with, and master, change. Be inspired and take home solid ideas for moving your organization forward and engaging its community.

This session looks at how libraries can distinguish themselves from other community activities and services, how they can partner with some of those other community groups and still keep their distinctiveness, and more. Think about where the learning commons ends and the library starts and how they interact; where the museum ends and the library starts; how public libraries can share programs with the zoo; how academic libraries can draw their non-academic communities in for support; and more.

To best support diverse challenges, the core technology infrastructure of libraries must be open and flexible. Libraries no longer tolerate closed systems unable to foster innovation. No system can be expected to function ideally for all types of libraries. Instead, the core systems must be open in ways that allow libraries to connect them with a diverse set of other applications, extract and work with the underlying data, or customize or develop new services. Open ecosystems have become an expected characteristic of modern technology. Google Apps enables companies and open source developers to offer apps which plug into Google’s offerings. Other examples include Salesforce, WordPress, or Drupal. Within the library sphere, the advent of the new genre of service platforms allows libraries to break away from legacy architectures to provide an open ecosystem of APIs for interoperability and extensibility. Libraries want to embrace open ecosystems to enable innovative new approaches to managing and providing access to collections, discovery, and services. Open environments can bring about radical change by harnessing the power of global participation, knowledge and talent. Libraries are opening and sharing access to collections and building more open and flexible spaces, but how can technology help us up our game and reimagine more open library ecosystems perhaps globally? Join us for thought-provoking conversations moderated by Marshall Breeding!