PLA Blog

I attended this preconference on Tuesday and absolutely LOVED most of the ideas presented. It was well organized and the day seemed to fly by! This presentation gave me bunches of ideas for use in my library. I work for the Henderson Public Libraries in Henderson, NV as a Youth Services Librarian. Next year we will be opening a branch and my current building is possibly moving to a new building, so there will be lots of chances to integrate these ideas into the new buildings.

If you have money to spend, the ideas presented by Kim van der Veen from Burgeon Group or Peg Sullivan from Highsmith, were very intriguing. In fact, most of them made me think, I want that! I know when I get back to work, I’ll be chattering the ear off of my co-workers.

I am however not going to wait, there were plenty of ideas presented by Dana Bjerke, Joanna Redmann, and Kelly Wussow that were simple, low cost, and non-permanent. I have pictures of some of the ideas.

Way to go ladies, lots of great information!

Rachel

You never know what the actual take-aways from a conference will be. For example, the last time I attended PLA (in Charlotte) I attended a session about serving coffee in the library. The speakers presented everything from the FOL serving coffee from a book truck to, I think it was Chicago PL (? the conference was a long time ago) that rented space on their ground floor to a coffee shop like Starbucks or Tullys and a portion of the sales went into the operating budget. I went home talking about coffee in the library. We never actually got a coffee cart, but we did manage to get rid of the “No Food and Drinks in the Library” signs!

What Children’s SpacesFamily Places has in common with the session I remember from Charlotte is that ideas were presented at the macro level and the micro level.

One of my two favorite parts of today’s session was the presentation by Kim van der Veen from Burgeon Group. She showed us the incredible creations and installations that their firm has done to support Early Learning in library environments. Her talk was utterly inspiring!

AND there are a lot of us who don’t have that kind of money, or aren’t involved in a building project, and still want to create a language-rich Early Literacy environment in our plain-old ordinary libraries. For us, the presentation by Dana Bjerke, Joanna Redman and Kelly Wussow from Hennepin County Library was utterly inspiring also. What a bunch of librarians can do with “cold laminate” and paper! I’d never even heard of cold laminate before today. Now I’m ready to go out and make cold laminate creations!