Post PLA Wrap-Up

I have been back from PLA for less than a week and it is time to wrap-up my experiences and make my to-do list.

Let's start with information you may have missed.  I attended a lot of great sessions, took a field trip, and had a great discussion over breakfast with other library professionals.  These were all written up over on the ALSC blog.

• Indianapolis Public Library
• Breakfast
• Makerbox: No Space Required
• Making a Collection Count
• Morning Jam Session, Story Time Style

My most memorable moments from PLA were:

• Having lunch with John Green (my boss traded lunch seats with me and is currently the BEST PERSON EVER!)
• Finding the Michigan State basketball team over at the Westin and taking lots of pictures with them (Go Spartans!!!).
• Children's author breakfast where we got a surprise bag of REAL books (not ARCs) and could have Anne Ursu, Jason Chin, and Rainbow Rowell sign them right away.
• Discussions with great librarians that I used to only know from the Twitterverse and blogosphere.

That's not to say that the presentations weren't great-they were.  I came away with a lot of notes and ideas for the future.  Plus, there's nothing like a children's librarian sing-a-long at 9:30 a.m. with the Wee Be Jammin' girls.  While conferences are extremely busy, they give you a chance to get re-energized about your job and come back refreshed.  For example, my Tuesday morning story times this week were AWESOME.  I was excited to do them and brought back some new ideas from PLA to try out.

What's next for me?  Here are some of my goals and projects generated from the conference:

• Start a library Pinterest page for recommended apps.  While we already have them up on our web site, I like the visuals that come with Pinterest.  For a really great example of how this is done, check out Little eLit on Pinterest.
• Work with the management team to set collection benchmarks.  We have a collection development in place, but this covers mostly theory and support for the mission statement.  I want to get down to the nitty gritty of discussing multiple copies, weeding, etc.
• I NEED to buy a bubble machine for my dance parties and story times.
• Check the correlation between standardized test scores and summer reading participation for our 47 schools.  (I did this yesterday and it is actually TRUE.)  Use this information to market summer reading to the schools.
• This one is going to take some time and money, but I would like to make circulating curriculum kits for teachers.  This way they can check out a stack of books in a bag on a topic and be ready to go.
• Support staff competencies for technology.  We have a lot of technology floating around my building and I would like to see everybody be comfortable using tools, such as an iPad, especially since we use them regularly in programming.
• Create a social story about the library and story time using Powerpoint to put up on our web site.

What are some great things that you came away with?