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On the 17th and 18th of September 2026, ALIAWest held their conference The Value of Us at the State Library of Western Australia. I was lucky enough to attend on the second day of the conference and was very impressed! It was great to meet with everyone, see the presentations and hear everyone speak. What stood out to me was all the suggestions for how people can get involved in the wider industry.

I’ll have to wait to see the recordings of the presentations done on Thursday, but I was able to see most of the presentations on Friday. I particularly enjoyed Christine Harris from FamilyHistoryWA’s presentation on the People of Western Australia’s Ghost Towns research project. The project is documenting ghost towns and the people associated with them across WA, an unprecedented level of research on the topic using new digital collection tools. 

The discussion of digital collections came up again with the presentation from Angela Heymans and Gwyn Williams on the Western Australian Military Digital Library, a globally accessible online platform that preserves military history associated with WA. Their website is incredibly impressive, and I advise anyone with a taste for historical artefacts to have a look! They really got me thinking about the different kinds of special collections, how they operate digitally, and the impact of their accessibility.

Both organisations also mentioned being eager for volunteers! It could be a wonderful opportunity to contribute to interesting projects and learn more about repositories and digitisation. Working and volunteering for large, well-known organisations can be valuable in their own way, but I think more specialised organisations like these ones are uniquely beneficial. It’s a chance to do more technical work and make a larger impact on an organisation. So, if anyone in WA does have the opportunity to get involved, I highly recommend it! 
Speaking of accessible digital collections, hearing about Wikimedia Australia from Alice Woods was also exciting. I certainly want to do more digging into everything they spoke about in their presentation! It’s another opportunity to contribute to the sharing of information and open access learning. 

But the best part of the conference was all the people I met and conversations I had! I got to meet a lot of lovely people and chat about various library topics and all the cute pins I was collecting from vendors. One of the best parts of events like this is to network with other library staff across WA and learn what everyone is talking about.  As you can expect, AI was a major topic around the morning tea table. People were curious about how different libraries were approaching AI generated content, particularly academic libraries, and had their own opinions on what they should be doing.  

Conferences and meet ups like this are great opportunities to learn about the conversations happening in the industry. The Value of Us was a uniquely impressive example, but there are smaller ones happening all the time around the country! They’re wonderful ways to meet people, network and learn. I advise anyone new to the information services industry to investigate what’s happening near them and give it a try!