Skip to main content
ALA 2025 Annual Conference Main banner
Icon Legend
Add a session to your schedule.
Remove a session from your schedule.
Presentation Icons
ASL
ASL
Closed Caption
Closed Caption
Main Stage
Main Stage
Ticketed Event
Ticketed Event
Schedule Change
Schedule Change

The Collectors Poster Session

Thinking Together: New Resources from a Community of Practice (Poster 23)

Sunday, June 29, 2025
1:30 PM – 3:00 PM EDT
Location: Pennsylvania Convention Center, Ballroom A
This presentation assembles the resources produced by a new community of practice that brings together library workers, advocates, and researchers. The community problem solves, experiments with bold ideas, and creates new resources that increase awareness of key issues impacting digital libraries. Featured projects include the following:

- A zine that presents a fresh framework for thinking about how digital lending supports and sustains modern libraries. With a focus on lending, owning, accessing, and networking—core functions of libraries— the zine illustrates how digital lending advances these goals.
- A guiding document for libraries collecting musical scores and sound recordings that helps them understand how these digital materials can be accessed and preserved in the current legal landscape. The resource helps libraries overcome the confusion created by the lack of contract exemption laws and digital first sale.
- A zine that invites greater awareness and support for prison library workers and highlights structural challenges incarcerated library workers and patrons face directly from their own words.

In addition to these and other projects, the poster will highlight information about the theory of learning and connection that informs the community’s structure and development. Attendees will leave with an understanding of “thinking together” as a critical component of building communities of practice.

Learning Objectives:

  • Attendees will be able to identify how digital lending can be a liberating force in modern libraries.
  • Attendees will be able to apply best practices to the collection and preservation of musical scores and sound recordings.
  • Attendees will be able to show trends and barriers in prison libraries.