FLA 2011

I got back from the Florida Library Association Annual Conference in Orlando Friday afternoon. I was busy taking advantage of the many great programs, exhibits and network opportunities and did not have much of an opportunity to blog while there.

So these are the highlights in no particular order for now:

I met many people including Roberta Stevens current President of the American Library Association. I was volunteering for the Leadership Voices Project and Gene, director from Palm Harbor, asked me to roam around and try to get people to come over and participate. I was talking to Betty Sammis from the North Palm Beach Library when I saw Roberta out of the corner of my eye talking to a few folks. I waited patiently for their conversation to end and then I asked her to participate in the Leadership Voices Project. While I was walking her over I made sure to tell her about my poster session on the Empowerment Zone that was scheduled for Friday. I also managed to tell her about the EZ, Sunshine State Library Leadership Institute, and the Palm Beach County Library Association (PBCLA). We exchanged cards and then she recorded her take on leadership.

After that I talked to David Lankes who gave the key note speech at the Opening Session. Check out his blog here. His speech was awesome and really re-engerized many in the audience including myself. He basically called for librarians to be more radical and I highly recommend listening to the speech on his blog. I asked him to participate in Leadership Voices and told him about PBCLA since he would be a great guest speaker for us.

On Thursday I bumped into Vickie Joslin Library Supervisor of the Lake Worth Public Library and she told me that the library is safe for now. http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifI have been an advocate for the library lately (along with a lot of other librarians across the County and State) and the City Commission rejected the City Manager's proposal to gut the library budget. This was great news and followed the other great news that the State decided to fund libraries to the level requested plus 100K over what they gave libraries last year.

Friday was my poster session and I presented on the Empowerment Zone. I was directly next to Matthew Moyer who writes articles for Library Journal on music in libraries. He works for the Jacksonville Public Library and we talked about cool music like The Knife and Royal Trux. I had a little over twenty people visit my poster session and after an hour I was pretty talked out. I made sure to give everybody handouts in case they had any questions. A few people mentioned that they would pass the information on since their library could use a similar program. This was an excellent opportunity to talk about my program and represent my library in a positive way.

I was honored to be recognized at the Opening Session, along with the other hardworking members of the FLA Public Relations Committee. See what we accomplished! Snapshot Day 2011! We will be conducting another Snapshot Day this year and Salena Coller is our new chair.

Now getting back to work and catching up on emails, interlibrary loans, the EZ, and PBCLA has made me very busy, but I plan on posting another blog update soon about what I learned at the FLA Sessions last week.