Amplifying Impact Through Collaboration: Reflections on the CILIPS Annual Conference 2026
Category: Blog
Reflections by Yi-Chieh Chiu, University of Edinburgh
The theme of this year’s conference, Amplifying Impact, prompted me to reflect on how libraries create meaningful change. Across sessions on archives, national collections, student wellbeing, European Union, and reading trends, a common thread emerged: the most effective library initiatives rarely depend upon a single institution acting alone. Instead, they are built through partnerships that connect different forms of expertise, experience, and knowledge. The conference offered a series of examples showing how such collaborations can strengthen library work at local, national, and international levels.
DPC / SCA: Co-producing Community Heritage
The first session, “Archives and Digital Preservation for All”, demonstrated that preserving local histories requires a genuinely collaborative ecosystem. Operating within the “Our Heritage, Our Stories” framework, the project brings together community groups, archivists, preservation specialists, and academic researchers, each offering expertise that the others cannot provide alone.
At the centre of the project are community archives and local heritage groups, whose members possess the lived experience, local knowledge, and trusted relationships necessary to document their own histories. Supporting them are the Scottish Council on Archives (SCA) and Community Archives and Heritage Group Scotland (CAHG Scotland), which provide coordination, outreach, and training across communities ranging from urban Glasgow neighbourhoods to remote Hebridean settlements. The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) supplies specialist knowledge in digital preservation, translating professional standards into accessible guidance on workflows such as file management, role allocation, and backup strategies. By making these processes more approachable, the DPC helps local groups take greater control of their own digital collections.
Alongside these partners, researchers from the Universities of Glasgow and Manchester share their digital humanities expertise and emerging technologies that help make community-generated histories discoverable and sustainable. Most significant, however, is the way authority is shared across the project. Rather than treating communities as sources of material for academic research, the initiative positions them as active partners in deciding how their histories are documented, preserved, and shared. Community knowledge, academic research, and preservation infrastructure are therefore brought together as complementary strengths, creating a model of archival practice in which stewardship becomes a genuinely shared responsibility.
National Library of Scotland: Participatory Stewardship at National Scale
If the DPC and SCA session demonstrated co-production at the level of community archives, the National Library of Scotland’s presentation, “The Next Chapter: Connections, Sustainability and Responsible Stewardship”, showed how similar principles can operate at a national scale. Through its current strategic framework, “The Next Chapter”, the library has begun to reposition its stewardship of national heritage within a wider public network.
Several projects presented by Alison Stevenson illustrated this approach. The OUTWITH centenary tour extended nationally significant collections beyond Edinburgh, enabling communities to engage with them within their own cultural contexts. Meanwhile, the Wellcome Trust-funded “Archive of Tomorrow” initiative brought together the NLS and researchers from the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, and Edinburgh to address the preservation of born-digital health information, combining the library’s preservation infrastructure with university research capacity.
The most compelling example was “Between Leaving and Living”, a project documenting the experiences of LGBTQ+ refugees navigating the UK asylum system. Developed in partnership with LGBT Unity Glasgow and the Media Co-op, the initiative adopted a participatory, post-custodial approach that returned curatorial control to participants. By enabling refugees to shape how their stories were recorded and represented, the project transformed the national repository from a collector of stories into a partner in their creation and preservation. The Library’s role was not diminished by this redistribution of authority; rather, its impact was expanded through collaboration.
Chill Out Spaces: Learning Through Institutional Comparison
While the first two sessions explored co-production, the discussion of “Chill Out Spaces in Academic Libraries” highlighted the value of comparison between institutions. By presenting projects from Glasgow Clyde College and Glasgow School of Art side by side, the session demonstrated how approaches to wellbeing are shaped by the needs of different student communities.
At Glasgow Clyde College, a large Further Education institution serving students from diverse educational and economic backgrounds, the emphasis was placed on communal and accessible forms of support. Flexible spaces, collaborative activities, and opportunities for informal interaction were designed to reduce stress and encourage peer connection. At Glasgow School of Art, where students often work within highly intensive studio environments, wellbeing provision took a different form. Quiet spaces, sensory rooms, and areas for retreat offered opportunities for reflection and decompression away from the pressures of creative production.
Despite their different approaches, both institutions shared a common understanding of wellbeing support. Neither treated it as a responsibility belonging solely to the library. Instead, these spaces formed part of wider support ecosystems involving counselling services, student wellbeing teams, and careers advisers, positioning the library as one contributor within a larger network of care. Comparing these approaches broadens our understanding of the relationship between library spaces and user wellbeing.
Klaas Gommers: Learning Beyond Borders
Having considered how institutions learn from one another within Scotland, Klaas Gommers’ presentation on “Strengthening Europe Through Public Libraries” expanded the discussion to an international scale. The session highlighted how professional challenges increasingly transcend national borders and how international exchange can help libraries respond to them.
Drawing on examples from the Netherlands and wider European networks, Gommers explored how public libraries are responding to shared challenges including digital exclusion, misinformation, social isolation, declining public trust, and barriers to civic participation. While Scottish libraries are already addressing many of these issues, the presentation offered alternative ways of framing their social value and communicating it to policymakers and funders.
What made the session particularly valuable was not the promotion of a single model, but the opportunity for comparison. Similar challenges exist across national borders, yet libraries often respond to them in different ways depending on their social, political, and funding environments. Comparing these approaches broadens our understanding of what is possible in our own context. In this sense, international networks function not simply as channels for advocacy, but as spaces for collective learning.
Dr Carina Spaulding: Reading Trends and Cultural Engagement
The final presentation, Dr Carina Spaulding’s discussion of adult and children’s reading trends in Scotland, prompted me to think beyond institutional and national boundaries towards collaboration across the cultural sector itself. If earlier sessions explored partnerships between archives, libraries, universities, and community organisations, this session raised broader questions about how cultural engagement is defined and measured.
The Reading Agency’s research already reflects changing reading practices through its inclusion of formats such as audiobooks. Listening to the presentation, however, I found myself wondering whether future research might benefit from greater dialogue with other cultural sectors. Museums, galleries, cinemas, publishers, and libraries increasingly compete for the same audience’s time and attention while all promoting different forms of cultural literacy. At the same time, the boundaries around reading have become increasingly blurred as cultural institutions themselves now operate across multiple media. If audiences move between books, podcasts, documentaries, exhibitions, journalism, and digital content, perhaps measuring reading alone captures only part of how people engage with knowledge.
This broader perspective also resonates with longstanding intellectual traditions. In “On Reading”, Arthur Schopenhauer cautioned against reading merely for volume, arguing that excessive consumption can discourage independent reflection. His concern remains relevant in an age of information abundance, where access to knowledge is no longer limited to printed texts. From this perspective, the goal of cultural institutions is not simply to maximise consumption but to cultivate deeper forms of engagement. While this extends beyond the scope of Dr Spaulding’s presentation, it left me wondering whether closer dialogue between libraries and other cultural organisations might offer a richer understanding of how people learn, reflect, and participate in contemporary cultural life.
Looking back across the conference, the sessions differed widely in subject matter, from digital preservation and national collecting strategies to student wellbeing, European cooperation, and reading research. Yet they repeatedly returned to the same lesson. Libraries achieve their greatest not in isolation, but through collaboration—with communities, researchers, educators, cultural organisations, and international partners. Coming from Taiwan, where many of us grow up conscious of the need to look beyond our immediate surroundings and remain attentive to developments elsewhere, I was particularly struck by the value of these professional networks. Working across different cultural and institutional contexts can sometimes feel daunting, but the conference demonstrated how much can be gained through openness, exchange, and collaboration. I hope to engage more actively in networks like these in the future: listening to people’s stories, helping communities document their histories, and contributing my own perspective to wider professional and cultural conversations.