You're Invited!
Join us for an inspiring in-person event designed for library professionals, with a spotlight on AI in the academic library space, emerging technologies, and strategies to navigate this evolving landscape.
Date: Tuesday, 17 June 2025
Location: Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre, Brisbane
Free event - Registration is essential – places are limited!
Expect a day full of learning, innovation, and networking in a state-of-the-art venue, alongside peers and thought leaders in the library field.
Reserve your spot today and register below!
Merrilee Proffitt, Senior Manager, OCLC Research Library Partnership (virtual)
Interest in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in libraries has grown significantly over the last two years, prompting a wide variety of conversations within libraries. This talk will focus on OCLC’s contributions to this area, including a deep dive on the OCLC Research Library Partnership (RLP) Metadata Managers Focus Group (MMFG) Managing AI in metadata workflows working group. The primary goal of the working group is to engage our collective curiosity, identify key challenges, and empower metadata managers to integrate AI into their workflows with confidence.
Presenter
Merrilee Proffitt is the Senior Manager of the OCLC Research Library Partnership, where she provides community management skills and support to institutions within the OCLC RLP.
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LET'S TALK ABOUT ANALYTICS IN LIBRARIES
Sean Duffy, Product Manager, OCLC Management Services & Shared Service (virtual)
In the competitive, ever-changing library landscape, data is essential to making informative decisions. Libraries are looking for solutions that can transform data into compelling stories that drive insightful collection management decisions for long-term planning with confidence and ease.
OCLC’s comprehensive suite of collection analytics solutions helps libraries do just that. From Choreo Insights to EZproxy Analytics, libraries are using these tools to gather data, analyze trends, and tell an impactful story of how their resources support academic priorities, foster collaboration, and reflect the evolving needs of their communities.
Presenter
Sean Duffy is a Product Manager of Choreo Insights and EZproxy Analytics at OCLC. Sean combines his passion for problem-solving with a knack for turning data into actionable insights. Over the past five years, he has played a pivotal role in developing and enhancing several analytics products, including Choreo Insights, EZproxy Analytics, License Manager, and WMS Analytics. With extensive experience in collection analytics, collection data, and usage stats, Sean helps libraries uncover the stories hidden in their data to better serve their communities.
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AI AND THE LESSONS WE LEARNED
Margaret Warren, Director, Content Management at the State Library of Queensland
Margaret will talk about the experiments at the State Library of Queensland with AI technologies to increase access, discovery and engagement with their collections and highlight some lessons that were learned along the way.
Presenter
Margaret Warren has a wide range of library experience including reference librarianship, collection development, project management, development of digitisation standards and guidelines, online delivery of audio and video, library management systems, systems librarianship, organisational change projects.
Director of the Content Management branch, responsible for the life cycle of State Library's physical and digital collections. Working with exceptional leaders and a talented and dedicated team of 80+ library and information management specialists.
Specialties: Copyright and Creative Commons, Collections management, leadership.
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LIBRARIES, TRUST and DISRUPTIVE TECH: OUR AI CHALLENGES
Sarah Brundrett, Manager, Library Services at the University of South Australia
Librarians currently find themselves in an evolving technological environment where we are facing questions around misinformation, ethics, data privacy, intellectual property (such as copyright) and algorithmic bias. The rapid development of “AI” and particularly “GenAI” tools brings significant challenges to libraries as well as enormous potential. We’ll take a look at some of these developments are and possible concerns regarding their adoption in (particularly academic) libraries, with a closer view of the cybersecurity vulnerabilities. There will be time for questions.
Presenter
Sarah Brundrett is a highly experienced library professional with knowledge and expertise in digital libraries and open scholarship. She is currently the Manager, Library Services at the University of South Australia's City East campus, supporting the health and allied health sciences. Sarah previously worked at Flinders University Library and the Bodleian Libraries. She became co-convenor of the new (Australian Scholarly Communications Community of Practice) Repositories Group in 2024. Sarah’s recent speaking experience includes THETA (2023), the ALIA Conference (2024), Everything Open (2025) and ALIA Online (2025).
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USING, TALKING ABOUT, AND PROVIDING ADVICE ON AI: AN ACADEMIC LIBRARY PERSPECTIVE
Kathleen Smeaton, Director, Collections and Technology, Monash University
At Monash University Library AI is changing the way we work in many different ways. From experimenting with in-house and vendor AI tools to enhance metadata, to deciding which tools to purchase, to providing advice on using AI tools and its impact on scholarly publishing, all areas of the library and our services are impacted. This presentation will explore some of the challenges and successes we've had with AI with Monash University Library and how we're incorporating the use of AI in our workflows and support.
Presenter
Kathleen Smeaton has been Director of Collections and Technology at Monash University Library since 2023. In her role at Monash University, Kathleen oversees collection management, including special collections and library technologies. As part of the work with collections, Kathleen is committed to ensuring collections are described and managed appropriately. Prior to starting at Monash University, Kathleen was Director of Collections and Digital Services at the University of Queensland Library. She has extensive experience with the development and management of a diverse portfolio of services, including digitization, collection development and management digital preservation, and open educational resources.
We hope you will join us and share in the conversation.