"What do we do in the event of earthquakes? How do we cope during periods of drought? How can we ensure the circulation of documents between several islands?" These were among the questions a participant from Université des Antilles raised during a week of professional exchange in the Azores. They are the operating realities of library staff at coastal and island universities. The blended intensive programme "University Libraries: Building Bridges to Internationalisation" set out to address them through peer exchange.
The programme ran from 27 April to 8 May 2026. It opened with a virtual session and continued with an on-site week at the University of the Azores (UAc) in Ponta Delgada, Portugal. UAc hosted, with West Pomeranian University of Technology in Szczecin (ZUT, Poland) and Université Le Havre Normandie (ULHN, France) as main organising partners. Twenty-six participants came from thirteen universities across seven countries.
The format put peer comparison first. Each library described its tools, digitisation strategies, and internationalisation practices in opening presentations. A benchmarking session built on these, exploring how staff mobility had shaped each library's services. Visits to the Ponta Delgada Public Library and to the city's museums extended the discussions into the wider documentary landscape of the island.
Choice of host was deliberate. As an archipelago university, UAc operates under constraints that continental libraries rarely encounter. These include document circulation between campuses separated by sea, contingency planning for seismic events, and collection development under tight budgets. These became the subject of dedicated sessions and produced the exchange that gave the programme its character. The colleague from Université des Antilles described what the visit made possible: "we had the opportunity to observe how another university library operates within an archipelago and to meet colleagues facing practical challenges similar to our own."
Among the eleven participants who responded to the feedback survey, satisfaction averaged 4.7 out of 5. A participant from the University of Sassari pointed to the comparative element: "I realised that many problems, as well as many solutions, are common and can be shared, even remotely." A colleague from ZUT framed the outcome as a starting point: "the established contacts and the exchange of good practices can be the basis for further cooperation and joint initiatives in the future."
The programme was delivered under Work Package 5 (Mobility and Internationalisation) of the EUNICoast project, through Task T5.6, which develops blended intensive programmes for students, teaching staff, and administrative staff across the alliance. It contributes to WP5's objectives for structured short-term mobility and professional development, and feeds into EUNICoast's targets for staff exchange and cross-institutional capacity-building.
Several participants, in their feedback, called for the outcome to develop into something more sustained: a structured professional network across EUNICoast's university libraries where institutions can coordinate approaches and build joint initiatives. The aspiration was consistent across libraries of different sizes and contexts, from smaller island institutions managing logistical constraints particular to their territory to larger partners with capacity to support shared infrastructure. The professional contacts established in Ponta Delgada provided the foundation.
