Workshop Calendar

The Athenaeum Project is a professional network built on peer mentoring, resource sharing, and cooperation across countries, cultures, and curricula. We produce open access resources for the international library community and publish them on various platforms, of which our flagship publication is the quarterly journal, Athenaeum.

Why do we need another group?

As a librarian in an international school, I’ve had to piece together my own professional development, adapting frameworks and lessons from various organisations in the hope they will be relevant to my international setting.  I know I’m not alone in this practice, and I love how adaptable we all are, but the truth is that we’re building a house made of straw.

Because people rotate in and out of the international scene, we are failing to lay a foundation, a knowledge base upon which the next generation of international librarians can build and innovate. This is one reason that we are gradually losing relevance in the wider educational landscape. It’s not the only reason, but it’s an important one because it’s entirely within our control. We need to stop adapting and start building. We need to work together as a single community despite our varied backgrounds and geographies. We need a professional development that directly addresses the particular needs of our global community. 

Until now, no organisation has existed whose primary goal is the personal and professional development of international school librarians. The Athenaeum Project is designed specifically to fill that gap.

Who is the Athenaeum Project for?

• people who have new ideas and want to discuss change
• people who want to make things and are happy to share them
• people who believe in lifelong learning and supporting each other’s growth
• people who enjoy discussing research and theory, and then making it practical
• people who want to contribute, to get what they need and to give back

How does it work?

The Athenaeum Project provides several platforms for communication, collaboration, and publication of professional library content. You may be a writer of educational theory, a designer of hands-on classroom activities, or maybe you are simply watching and listening for now?

We meet monthly for peer mentoring sessions on Zoom, set our agenda as a community, and collaborate to produce solutions to each other’s challenges. Long-form conversations happen via our members’ forum, which is our day-to-day communication channel. Resources that are created by the network are stored in our Knowledge Base for easy access and retrieval. Published content is distributed on several digital platforms as open resources to benefit the wider library community, but ownership and copyright stay with the authors.

Publication is a key activity of the Athenaeum Project

Despite there being thousands of international school librarians worldwide, we do not have a cohesive body of research, writing, and commentary – because we lack a dedicated platform. Librarians are forced to either publish ‘back home’ with their national organisations, or post into the blogosphere and risk being sucked into a swamp of commercial mediocrity. The Athenaeum Project publishes on several digital platforms to increase visibility for authors, and indexes all published works in an open-access repository for easy discoverability. We publish in the broadest possible sense, meaning not just academic writing such as essays and opinion pieces, but also practical products such as lesson plans, case studies, and guidebooks.

We recognise that professional writing is embedded in a framework of language and cultural capital, and that some writers may require support to be successful. All of our content is edited to control quality, but our editorial process is designed to support aspiring writers rather than gatekeep publication based on culture or qualification. Editorial mentoring is an effective way to reduce the barriers to authorship and ensure the quality of our publications.

Athenaeum Journal

The Athenaeum Project publishes regularly on several digital platforms, all of which culminates in its flagship, the quarterly journal Athenaeum.

Athenaeum is published under an open-access licence. Any interested individual may submit their work if it meets the journal’s editorial guidelines. We do not charge or take payment for publication, and copyright remains with the author. Athenaeum is currently in development – our application is pending before the ISSN International Centre in Paris.

Early membership to the Athenaeum Project

Founding members gain early access and will have a hand in our early formation.

Early Access for Founders – available until November 1st – £99

Regular annual subscriptions – £150