Overview

The Association of Creative Technologies in Academic Libraries (ACTAL) is a professional organization that seeks to bring together people working in creative technologies – media labs, makerspaces, equipment loan, visualization spaces, and beyond – in academic libraries.

Creative technology spaces within libraries are now somewhat common, especially within large academic libraries. Our collective experience has been shaped by running, and in some cases, starting, five unique creative technology spaces located in university libraries in the southeastern United States.

In the few years that ACTAL has existed, we have continued to hold virtual and in-person conferences yearly. Our members have published in this new field. We have created a Discord for members to connect with each other.And our website is continued to be updated with new information and resources for our members.

We continue working towards building ACTAL to be an organization that will support the staff of these unique library spaces and in turn, assist those implementing these types of services, and in turn improve and expand services for each of our institutions.

Board of Directors

• President : Amanda McCollom, University of Delaware
• Vice President: Vanessa Rodriguez, University of Miami
• Secretary: Eric D M Johnson, Virginia Commonwealth University

Board Members:

• Jason Evans Groth, University of Virginia
• Oscar Keyes, Virginia Commonwealth University
• Jen Nichols, University of Arizona
• Emily Thompson, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

To contact the Board, please write to contact@actalibraries.org.

History

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of directors from southeastern libraries with these types of multimedia spaces began an informal community of practice to share experiences and shifting procedures; this was developed into the Southeastern Multimedia Librarians group (SEML). Interest in our group grew quickly, and we would eventually decide to create a national organization to expand support to a greater number of people. ACTAL is the name for the internationally expanded group that started as SEML.

Within a year, we had heard from colleagues at other institutions that they were interested in joining SEML. This led us to hosting a virtual potluck on May 17, 2022 to hear from others about what they were interested in and what type of support they were looking for. From this, we quickly worked to put together our first conference in Fall of 2022 and changed the name from SEML to ACTAL in order to reflect the fact that we were no longer regional to the southeast. 

Report

Download a report about ACTAL for your organization. Last updated March 2025.