About
The AMICAL Consortium’s mission is to advance learning, teaching and research through the collaborative development of library and information services and curricular resources at member institutions.
AMICAL is an international consortium of 28 American‐modeled institutions in 18 different countries. It is a cooperative organization for advancing learning, teaching and research through the collaborative development of library, technology and curricular resources at member institutions. AMICAL's membership is composed almost entirely of non‐profit US‐accredited colleges and universities, following American models in their curricular organization and their staff's professional environment, but located in Europe, Central and Southern Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Their liberal arts educational missions and pedagogy distinguish them from local institutions, and their staff and faculty are generally well connected with colleagues from international scholarly and professional communities. They are often seen as leading or innovative institutions in their respective countries.
The consortium was inaugurated through an initial planning meeting at the American University of Paris (AUP) in 2004. Since then, AMICAL has funded its operations and consortial programs through a combination of institutional member fees and periodic grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to AUP, AMICAL’s administrative home. Our most recent grant from the Mellon Foundation, entitled “Building Leadership and Capacity for Digital Liberal Arts across AMICAL,” is running over the three years from 2018 through 2021.
AMICAL’s current programs are shaped around the following strategic focus areas:
Cost‐saving on information resources and services
Facilitating collaborative purchasing of library databases and services, and other licensed academic resources.
Information and digital literacies
Helping our students develop effective skills and critical dispositions in their use, creation and sharing of information in a digital environment.
Library and technology leadership
Strengthening and supporting the management, planning and decision‐making capacities of our library and technology professionals through professional development and shared resources for benchmarking and assessment.
Locally grounded forms of digital liberal arts pedagogy and scholarship
Helping learners and scholars combine digital methods with humanistic inquiry, anchored with the resources or geo‐cultural contexts of AMICAL institutions.
We work in those areas primarily through our staff and faculty development events and cohort programs, through our Small Grants program, and through our online community platforms and collaboration tools.
AMICAL holds an annual Conference on member campuses where participants have the opportunity to discuss emerging issues in libraries and information services in higher education, often with the participation of leading figures in these areas. The annual meetings are also an essential opportunity for AMICAL’s working groups and committees to plan collaborative projects for the coming year.
AMICAL’s membership is aligned with AAICU (the Association of American International Colleges and Universities), whose participants are the campus leadership of AMICAL’s Full and Affiliate Member institutions. As a consortial organization, AMICAL belongs to the ACL (the Association for Collaborative Leadership) and ICOLC (International Coalition of Library Consortia) and partners with OCLC to offer library services to participating members. AMICAL’s development has been made possible through the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The American University of Paris is AMICAL’s founding and host institution.