2012 AMICAL Conference

Satenik Avagyan BA Director, AGBU Papazian Library Director, and  Berj Gatrjian, the ICTS Director who is the current AMICAL Vice-Chair attended the ninth annual meeting and conference of the American International Consortium of Academic Libraries (AMICAL) held at American University of Sharjah, UAE, from April 4–7, 2012.  The conference was centered on the following topics: getting started with institutional repositories and digital archives; innovated learning technologies; libraries and learning spaces; moving library systems and services into the cloud; academic videoconferencing.

AMICAL is a consortium that brings together librarians, instructional technologists, IT professionals, and faculty that are interested in working together to improve their library and information services, and ultimately the educational and research environments of their institutions. Around 70 people throughout Europe, Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa attended this year’s four-day meeting, which included panel discussions, rounds of lightning talks, roundtable discussions and workshops.

“This conference was very interesting and gave us the opportunity to learn many issues in regards to digital asset management and how librarians, information technologists and faculty can facilitate new forms of learning in a digital context. We were very impressed with the conference overall. It was very well organized, the keynote speakers were very well selected and we had the opportunity to share some issues we face here at AUA with others”, mentioned S. Avakian.