Annual Conference Update

Mission Accomplished! This year’s conference was a resounding success. I hope you enjoyed the 2025 Annual Conference as much as I did. I truly treasure the opportunity to reconnect with old friends and to make new ones. I would like to reiterate what Ione reminded us in their keynote, “ALAO = Community.” For more than a decade, I have deeply valued our community, and I hope you feel that same sense of connection and support.

This year, we were fortunate to welcome presenters from Ohio, Illinois, Tennessee, Georgia, and Michigan. I want to extend my sincere thanks to all of them for offering such a rich variety of content and perspectives. Their contributions will undoubtedly strengthen the work we do engaging with our patrons at our home institutions. Developing this content requires significant time, energy, and thought, and we are truly grateful for the dedication each presenter brought to this year’s conference. Look at our line-up of stellar presentations and posters.

Each year, we invite conference attendees to complete a post-conference survey to share their experiences. The Conference Planning Committee (CPC) carefully reviewed feedback from the 2024 conference and used it to guide our planning for 2025. As a result, we implemented several key changes, including:

• We did our best to assign sessions and rooms. (We recognized that this isn’t an exact science.)
• Dramatically reduced the number of tables in the smaller rooms, allowing for more chairs and overall space.
• Utilized more rooms for each concurrent session.

We are looking forward to reviewing the feedback from this year and passing it forward to next year’s CPC.

I would especially like to thank Ione T. Damasco and Hanna Schmillen for their outstanding contributions to this year’s conference. In their keynote, Ione shared powerful insights on how Critical Hope can guide us through the challenges we face in academic librarianship today. While Hanna did an excellent job in leading this year’s Pre-Conference on the growth of evidence synthesis across the disciplines and how librarians can meet the challenge of supporting this methodology.  

Finally, this year’s conference would not have been possible without the tireless work of the Conference Planning Committee.  I am endlessly thankful for their hard work over the last 11 months of planning. 

• Don Appleby, ALAO Treasurer
• Cara Calabrese, Indiana University at Bloomington
• Emily Henderson, Columbus State Community College
• Kristine Kinzer, Columbus State Community College
• Katie Maxfield, University of Dayton
• Abigail Morgan, Miami University of Ohio
• Gerald Natal, University of Toledo
• Kristen Peters, Case Western Reserve University
• Mira Scarnecchia, Columbus State Community College
• Diane Schrecker, Ashland University
• Leticia Wiggins, The Ohio State University
• Rob O’Brien Withers, Miami University of Ohio

We look forward to seeing you again at ALAO’s conference next year. So, mark your calendars!  Next year’s conference is set for October 29 & 30, 2026 at the OCLC Conference Center in Dublin, Ohio.  More information will come out in the spring of 2026.  

Executive Board Meeting Report

In the last ALAO executive board meeting we finalized and approved the updated Strategic Plan for 2025-2030.  In the spring of 2025, Sara Klink met with and listened to many of our committees and IGs on how we should update ALAO’s Strategic Plan.  Given the current political climate, we sought to keep the previous Mission Statement and update the Focus Areas of our strategic plan to better reflect our core commitment to supporting, including, and empowering our members to succeed.  I have asked each of our committees and IGs to develop goals that directly align with at least one of these Focus Areas.

As President, I am eager to focus on Focus Area 3: Stewardship & Development, particularly ensuring that our existing IGs and committees have the membership needed to thrive. I have formed a small task force to support this effort, and we will begin our work together in January.