CERL Seminar 2025

This year, the theme for our annual seminar is Founding Collections. We would love to hear from colleagues in Europe, the Americas or Australia/New Zealand: how do you make strategic use of your founding collections in today's library? More extensive information below. Feel free to write to secretariat@cerl.org with your ideas.

In the 2025, the seminar is hosted by the National Library of Scotland and it will take place on Tuesday 21 October 2025.

Large research libraries of Europe are typically proud of their founding collections, and still have a vivid interaction with them.

The founding collections mirror the lives, interests and relationships of the individuals who amassed them, they are a witness of the social and personal biases of the times, they reflect political geography and instances of preservation and loss.

The founding collections may be products of chance encounters, wealth, discovery, acts of generosity, or even acts of theft or looting. The process of collecting and transformation into a founding collection is thus partly deliberate and partly ruled by chance. Founding collections can shape the identities of the institutions they belong to for a very long time – perhaps even permanently - which is the theme of this conference.

CERL 2025 is inviting presentations at its annual conference that will speak to the role of founding collections in our libraries today, in order to meaningfully connect to today’s audiences and various research topics.

Papers might include:

• Examples of founding collections that are inextricably linked to identity formation at the time of foundation, and which remain relevant to people today
• Examples where founding collections have been used to propel thinking forwards, either because of the trajectory the founding collection set, or because of deliberate departures from it
• Examples where identities have been formed around founding collections that are perhaps flawed in some way and which has led institutions to consider representing them in a new light, more aligned with todays social and political contexts
• Examples where the passage of time has led to founding collections revealing things to 21st century audiences that are vital to our study today of who we are