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ARL Liaison Program Heads Invited to Discuss New Roles at ALA Midwinter

Health sciences librarian with medical faculty

ARL’s Transforming Research Libraries initiative is sponsoring a meeting in conjunction with the upcoming American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter Meeting to convene ARL liaison program directors and continue the conversation around new roles for liaison librarians. The meeting will be led by Francine DeFranco, director of library research services at University of Connecticut, and Rita Vine, head of faculty and student engagement at University of Toronto.

The recently released New Roles for New Times report, Transforming Liaison Roles in Research Libraries, provides an overview of the current liaison model and outlines the changing faculty and student needs that liaisons need to address in order to build strong partnerships that support research and academic endeavors. The report, based on information gathered from research and personal interviews, presents new trends that suggest a service direction based on user activities rather than liaison functions.

For those who oversee staff involved in liaison roles, the challenge exists to build a new structure of faculty and student support that engages current liaisons and library staff in new and innovative ways. How can libraries encourage liaisons to embrace new roles? What strategies can be established to build new skills? What changes are needed to establish collaborative, cooperative structures to support faculty and student research and academic needs? This meeting will address these questions and identify other areas of concern.

The liaison roles meeting will be held on Monday, January 27, 10:00–11:30 a.m., at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, room Franklin 09. Registration is not required to attend this meeting, but attendance is limited to liaison supervisors from ARL libraries. To help the organizers plan the meeting, participants are requested to complete this brief questionnaire.


The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 125 research libraries in the US and Canada. Its mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. ARL pursues this mission by advancing the goals of its member research libraries, providing leadership in public and information policy to the scholarly and higher education communities, fostering the exchange of ideas and expertise, facilitating the emergence of new roles for research libraries, and shaping a future environment that leverages its interests with those of allied organizations. ARL is on the web at https://www.arl.org/.

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