TLA Annual Conference 2018 - Memphis

All in for Tennessee Libraries. That was the theme for the 2018 Tennessee Library Association annual conference held in Memphis, April 4-6. The logo was a very cool hand in hand.

Going to Memphis on April 4, 2018 did not escape my background in US history. 50 years ago on April 4, Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated. The logo for the TLA conference carried even more meaning.

I was fortunate to attend this trip because a large portion was reimbursed by Chattanooga State as this conference was my turn to attend on behalf of the Kolwyck Library.  I did save the college a lot of money on registration because of my personal membership dues in the TLA association combined with the early bird discount gave a really good price for the three-day event.

I planned ahead for the conference and made reservations for a car rental about a month earlier. For this trip I was from South Carolina. But what was funny, it was a Ford Focus, the same car model that I drive to work everyday in - a bit ironic.

Before I get to the list of workshops I attended and the quotes I wrote down from the keynote speaker at the TLA business meeting, I want to mention two profound things.

Profound number one: Meeting Librarians, Meeting People
At the networking opportunities and the SIS get-together, I talked and talked and met people. What's weird was that I knew these people, at least, virtually. For the first time, I met librarians who I had followed on Twitter for years and even retweeted or commented on their tweets. It was very cool to finally connect in person!  The other people I met that I knew only virtually were my colleagues from SIS! Wow - for the first time I met the person who I was co-president with for the UTK ALA-TLA student organization! That seems unbelievable that two people could be co-presidents and not be able to pick a person out of the crowd - hey it worked! I met other SIS colleagues as well and now we are connected after graduate school by knowing who we are!  Networking to me was my number one accomplishment for this entire conference!

Profound number two: For the first time, I was actually able to speak with Heather Lanier, TLA president-elect. She and I had talked before at TLA board meetings - she was always impressed with my meeting preparations, which I told her came from years on the Tennessee PTA board. Heather seemed full of energy and drive. But unknown to me, and something she found out after the conference, she had cancer. And eight weeks later, she was gone from this Earth too soon, too young.

I need to pause a minute.

 

Moat surrounding Memphis Hilton, location of the 2018 conference

Besides networking, I find that conferences provide opportunities to learn through workshops. And I found some good ones for me to attend. Here are the list of workshops and key takeaways:

Workshop One - We're all in this together! How to draw students back into the library. (Academic Library track) Want help finding something but library land is confusing -- website design, books on library shelves. How do we reach our students? How do you get students to use digital resources in the library? Two good audience responses were focus group using library student assistants on the topic of how does the library look to a student, and students are intimidated by librarians intelligence.

Workshop Two - NEDTalks: Lightning talks in the library (Academic Library track) A very cool idea to bring students (and faculty) in to the academic library to do something like TED Talks but on a certain focus or tied to a student/faculty project. Too much information to put into a blog post, but I can see it being used at Chatt State.

Workshop Three - Oral history made easy to build a digital library. A very cool workshop led by my new library friend from Motlow State. She identified the tools and the program for any library to build a digital library of oral histories. I like this idea for our archive team at Kolwyck Library, especially a "Day in the Life of ..."

Workshop Four - All in collaborative video (Academic Library track) This workshop explained how to create videos for touring library / highlighting services or resources / interactive videos including scripting and other pre-production work. I like this idea for our marketing team at Kolwyck Library.

Workshop Five - Four of a kind: Upping the ante for first year academic librarians. I really enjoyed this workshop as three of my colleagues from UTK SIS talked about what they found useful from SIS and one thing they weren't prepare for (tenure track responsibilities especially). I loved when I heard how the Four Frames was useful - it has been for me as well.

Librarians have fun too!

The keynote speaker was Jamie LaRue, ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom. I want to leave these four powerful quotes from LaRue's speech as parting thoughts. [Quotes are paraphrased by me, a former reporter.]

1. Parents – do you want your kids to be healthy, to be focused, to be productive? A key indicative factor for this answer is the number of books in the home by age 5. Age 5.

2. Librarians are a trusted profession. People trust librarians.


3. Reference librarians are "transactional to transformational" type of people.

4. Collection development – we need to change our stigma and look at self-published books. Amazon publishing.