Annual Conference 2025
M25 Consortium Annual Conference 2025
Shaping the Future
The Conference was held on Tuesday 24 June 2025 at the University of Greenwich. All member institutions were eligible to receive one free place. Further member places have discounted attendance fees, and there were also group booking discounts.
Our objective was to offer an annual conference that enabled delegates to return to their institutions with practical ideas to follow up and consider implementing in their own service.
The conference was a great success: with nearly 100 attendees including a wide range of library staff, from library assistants to directors of library services. The type of libraries they represented reflect the diversity of the M25 Consortium membership: HE libraries plus museum and special research collection libraries. Delegates loved the grand venue and the excellent programme with a mix of presentations, workshops and lightning talks from staff from member libraries. They also appreciated the time to network in person.
You can view the Conference’s packed programme here: Conference 2025 event page.
What our delegates said:
“An amazing conference – met so many people, exchanged e-mails, got an opportunity to present, good interaction with sponsors.”
“Wonderful event – I learned so much and can’t wait to bring all these things back to my library”.
We asked delegates: ‘What one thing have you learnt or has inspired you that you’ll take back to your workplace? They said:
- Sustainability initiatives.
- Inspired by keynote talk on defending the role of human services and critical thinking.
- I’ll be thinking about the Jisc digital tool kit.
- 3 dimensions of kindness.
- Diversity survey (recruitment focussed).
- Role of humans in an increasingly tech-driven environment.
- Power of collective action.
- Be more wolf.
- Digital leadership
- The ideas of community and humanity felt like threads throughout many of the sessions today.
- Considering the safety of women in the workplace, I will go and review library risk assessments and ensure these issues are highlighted at university committee level.
- I really liked the idea of competitive data deletion to reduce our carbon footprint.
- How different institutions are dealing with AI and the opportunities / issues that it brings.
- I’ve made some great additional networking opportunities and found out some really useful info to take back and explore with my team – particularly around Estates liaison and the Digital lens.
- Tips for building and maintaining a good relationship with university Estates team.
- The environmental implications of unchecked storage of data.
- Advocacy for the Library and the Librarian.
- Uni of Westminster poster of Sensory Mapping.
- That we (academic librarians) are doing amazing things in all aspects of librarianship.
Read our Staff Development Award Recipients reports:
Report from M25 Consortium Conference 2025 recipient Leah Gulley, Buckinghamshire New University