The PLA Blog | Official Blog of the Public Library Association
DIY Usability Study: Is Your Library People-Focused?
Library Journal Movers and Shakers Sandra Sajonas and Lisa Chow teamed up to run an excellent talk table on methods you can use to study your library and make sure you are focusing on users in ways that work for them. They presented a project they did for library school focusing on the Highlawn branch [...]
Literary Portland
So this isn’t expressly related to the conference, except that it was located in Portland, so of course I had to visit the Multnomah County Public Library and Powell’s Books. I’d heard great things about Multnomah County Library and actually just been to a great program on storytelling sponsored in part by librarians who worked [...]
“It Wasn’t Reading, It Was Learning.” Children’s Author Luncheon with Kadir Nelson
(sorry it’s taken me so long to post this, I wanted to do justice to this amazing event!) Kadir Nelson, award-winning author and illustrator, had the crowd laughing at pictures he drew at five and learning from research he spent years on during his interesting and engaging talk at the PLA Children’s Author Luncheon on [...]
Tweeting at the conference
Everyone’s been doing such a lovely job of recapping sessions they attended, so I wanted to get a little meta on you guys and talk about how Twitter was used at PLA this year. For a little context, the way I was keeping up with PLA happenings on Twitter was partly though the people I [...]
Volunteering at the exhibit hall
Yesterday I volunteered at the PLA Membership Booth between the first and second sessions of the day. It was a lot of fun and a nice way to just chat with people who came by. There was one librarian from Chicago who said she was so happy to see young people entering the profession who [...]
Serving pregnant or parenting teens
I’m not sure what it is, but I seem to really enjoy the early morning sessions. Today the first one I attended was “Pregnant/Parenting Teens: Promoting Library Services Among the Underserved” with Maryann Mori, the director of the Waukee Public Library in Waukee, Iowa. She addressed the needs of pregnant and parenting teens, what libraries [...]
Extreme resume makeover
Since I’ll be graduating in just six short weeks, I was a little disappointed to see that there wouldn’t be a job placement center this year at PLA. I checked out ALA’s site on finding a job, but I wanted something more personal and dialog-driven, so I made sure to sign up for the resume [...]
Queering the library
[Please note: throughout this post, I'll be using "queer" to refer very broadly to the LGBTQIA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning/queer, intersex, and asexual/ally) community.] The first session I attended today was Spanning the Generations: Serving the GLBTIQ Community of ALL Ages. Unfortunately two of the speakers, Nancy Silverrod and KR Roberto, were unable to [...]
Visit “Ramona’s World” in Portland
Beloved by children, librarians, and the entire world for sixty years, Beverly Cleary’s Ramona Quimby calls Portland, Oregon home. I know without a doubt one of the reasons I am a librarian today is because I loved books so much as a child and so much of that love existed thanks to the works of [...]
Faking it
I just attended “How to Get the Library DIrector Job You Want” presented by Dan Bradbury of Gossage Sager Associates, not assoicated with the Goose. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goose_Gossage Dan was joined at the podium by June Garcia, and another member from Gossage Sager Associates. If you are thinking of shifting jobs, even if it isn’t to a [...]
