At the initiative of the UPPA libraries, the libraries of the 6 founding member universities of UNITA have been grouped in a network since the launch of the Alliance.
Since 2021, many video-conference meetings have been held, and several actions have been carried out in common in the field of training students to evaluate information and decipher fake news:
- a common resource base on fake news for library trainers
- common training framework that can be adapted by each library according to its context
- common survey on the training needs, knowledge and practices of students regarding online information and fake news (fall 2022).
On March 16 and 17, 2023, Pau's library welcomed a group of 7 staff, composed of librarians from the University of Beira (Portugal), the University of Turin (Italy), the University of Zaragoza (Spain) and the University of Timisoara (Romania), as well as librarians from the different sites of UPPA (Pau, Basque Coast, Tarbes), for two days of meeting organized by the Common Documentation Service thanks to the support of UNITA. The University of Savoie Mont-Blanc (Chambéry), also very involved in the network, were unfortunately unable to join these face-to-face meetings.
The program included an intercomprehension workshop that allowed everyone to overcome linguistic difficulties and to dare to express themselves in their mother tongue, experience sharing sessions and work on current and future perspectives of cooperation between libraries, the presentation of UNITA, a visit of the campus and the library, as well as a facilitation workshop led by educational engineers that allowed to outline the next steps of the collaboration between libraries within UNITA.
Conviviality was the order of the day, with shared lunches, a tour of downtown Pau, and a dinner in the city on Thursday evening.
At the end of this very fruitful meeting, the UNITA libraries have strengthened their ties and laid a solid foundation for new collaborations, by agreeing to meet again in the near future, in another university of the Alliance.
The entire library team hopes to soon expand their network to the libraries of the new members of the UNITA Alliance.