FACRL is pleased to announce Chad Mairn as our keynote speaker for the FACRL 2023 Virtual Conference! We hope you join us on October 20 as we discuss the Best Practices and Trends in Academic Libraries.

Unlocking the Potential and Possible Perils of Emerging Technologies in Academic Libraries

In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, academic libraries are not just repositories of books and journals; instead, they are vital centers of innovation and knowledge dissemination. Academic libraries have been integrating emerging technologies into traditional pedagogy to revolutionize how students, faculty, and staff interact with information and engage in meaningful learning. In this keynote, we will explore the exciting possibilities of embracing emerging technologies within academic libraries and unlock the potential of artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, creativity, and more while discussing issues of accessibility, data privacy, and digital literacy. In a recent open letter, President Barack Obama mentions librarians are “fighting every day to make the widest possible range of viewpoints, opinions, and ideas available to everyone” and this strengthens our vision for the future of learning, research, and collaboration while clearly demonstrating how academic libraries will continue to be at the forefront of knowledge dissemination and transformational education.

Chad Mairn is an Information Services Librarian, Assistant Professor, author, and founder of the Innovation Lab at St. Petersburg College. While an undergraduate studying Humanities at the University of South Florida (USF), Chad was awarded a Library of Congress Fellowship helping archive personal papers and other items in the Leonard Bernstein Collection. During his Library and Information Science graduate work, also at USF, Chad became a technology liaison between the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Florida public libraries.

Much of  Chad's recent interests have focused around mobile and emerging technologies; he has written a couple of book chapters and numerous articles on technologies impacting society. In 2016, Chad was awarded the League of Innovation Excellence Award in Teaching and Learning for Innovation in the Use of Technology.

We hope to see you online at the conference. Register today!