About CAPAL24

sUSTAINABILITY and shared futures in academic libraries

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The Canadian Association of Professional Academic Librarians (CAPAL) invites you to participate in its annual conference, to be held virtually. This conference offers librarians and allied professionals across all disciplines an alternative space to share research and scholarship, challenge current thinking about professional issues, and forge new relationships. By holding a virtual conference every second year, CAPAL/ACBES hopes to allow for broader participation in our annual conference.

Theme

The theme for CAPAL24 is Sustainability and Shared Futures in Academic Libraries.

As our institutions face increasing structural, political, and social challenges, academic librarians must consider the sustainability of our roles, practices, and profession. The question of sustainability arises in many different facets of academic librarianship.

• Political sustainability: how can we work individually and collectively to address increased job precarity, shifting role definitions, and the loss of collegial decision making?

• Social sustainability: how do we move forward as a profession to ensure that we are actively promoting social equity within our professional practice and our institutions? How do we make these gains sustainable and build structures to amplify equity-deserving communities?

• Environmental sustainability: how can academic staff and organizations build awareness of environmentally sound practices, both within our spaces and our communities? What role can the profession play in building  resiliency, and understanding related to the effects of climate change?

• Technological sustainability: how do we adapt our practices to thrive in an educational landscape increasingly dominated by generative AI and other emerging technologies?