Jill Veerkamp, SELCO - PLA Scholarship Recipient
Lanesboro Public Library

Wow, what a busy day. I had to get up early to begin with to get some work done for my library – taking an actual three day break from the library really isn’t an option. Anyways, the first session that I went to today was “Running the One Women (or Man) Show: Successful Adult Programming When You Have a Million Things to Do!” The talk would have been extremely interesting and relevant to my work, if only the presenter gave a talk that mirrored the session’s title. Essentially, the speaker talked about the importance of programming and using the community to find and promote programs, from point of view of a librarian at a suburban Boston library – not exactly a one person show. In any case, the presentation did allow me to come up with some good ideas for programming for my own library. The second morning session that I attended was “Making Cities Stronger: Public Library Contributions to Local Economic Development.” I initially attended this event because the mayor of Minneapolis was listed as one of the presenters, but it turned out that he couldn’t make it. However, it still was an interesting session. The essential heart of the presentation was that libraries act as catalysts for economic development in urban areas; which is probably true for areas of all sizes as well. For lunch, I attended the Children’s Author Luncheon featuring Pat Mora and Raúl Colón. I sat next to someone who lived a half an hour from Manhattan; I told her that I lived a half an hour from a stoplight. Anyways, the author presentations were very good and stressed the importance of having a multilingual and multicultural collection for children. The last session that I attended today was “Weeders Attract for Readers.” I thought this presentation was AMAZING, but I am biased, because the presenter, Belinda Boon, was my graduate advisor in my MLIS program at Kent State. Overall, Belinda stressed the importance in weeding in order to maintaining an accurate and relevant collection. After the talk, Belinda and I went to check out the new Minneapolis Public Library (soon to be Hennepin County Public Library). Everything looked so shiny, new, and spacious. I would almost kill for one of their display tables, or at least, the space to put one. Oh, well – one can always dream.