December 2, 2024

NAG’S 15th Collection Development Seminar and Public Library Forum – 40 Years of NAG: Looking Back, Looking Forward
Thursday 15th May 2025, Leeds Marriott Hotel

We invite you to join NAG in celebrating our 40th birthday, in looking back at where we have come from, and looking forward to potential future developments.

We will be reflecting on our experiences in the acquisition, management and development of library resources: examining and assessing how our processes and workflows have changed; considering the positives and negatives; and seeking to identify practical actions to refine and improve them for the future.

Through this reflective practice, we seek to enable our attendees, as library professionals, to build and share specialist knowledge from experience in order to better deal with complex situations and demonstrate accountability, and to examine, challenge and foster the values that inform our practice.


NAG’s 15th edition of the highly successful Collection Development Seminar and Public Libraries Forum event will take place at the Leeds Marriott Hotel, Trevelyan Square, LS1 6ET, on Thursday 15th May 2025.

For this edition, the topic is “Looking Back, Looking Forward” NAG invites papers from those that can share knowledge and experiences around reflective practice, and how the past influences the present and the future of library work.

For example, what’s changed about your library’s:

  • Financial situation;
  • Ethical considerations and responsibilities;
  • Procurement options;
  • Demand from customers/users;
  • Processes and workflows, systems and technologies.

We are interested in hearing from past speakers, and NAG Award and Grant winners to update us on their projects.  We also welcome contributions on issues such as:

  • Refining and updating good practice guidelines and standards.
  • Evolving collection development strategies in response to the changing needs of our users.
  • Process reviews, adopting new technologies or workflows, supporting continuous improvement.
  • Supplier-selection and review, supply-chain efficiency and automation.
  • Evidence-based collections evaluation; collections as data; benchmarking and retention strategies.
  • Ethical collections, re-evaluating how/where libraries spend their content budget.

At this event there will be two streams, one for Academic Libraries and one for Public Libraries. We invite prospective speakers from both sectors to submit papers for this event and we are particularly keen to bring both groups together for shared papers with broad cross-sector applicability.

Final date for submission of abstracts is 2nd February 2025. Notification of acceptance will be by 21st February 2025. All speakers receive a full free Seminar/Forum place plus UK travel expenses. Speakers do not need to be current NAG members.

  • Papers are normally 30 minutes, including questions.
  • Proposals for Lightning Talks (10 minutes) are also welcome.
  • If you have an idea for a Workshop style session or a Panel Discussion, please get in touch.

Please email your submissions to the NAG office – full contact details in our website footer below.

Commercial sponsorship opportunities are available

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