ILF District 6 Conference

This past Friday I was at the annual conference for District 6 of the Indiana Library Federation.  It was a great time!  The library in North Vernon, IN was really spacious and lovely.  The keynote speaker at the conference was Michael Cart, a writer and former library director in Beverly Hills, CA.  He had some great stories about celebrities and some interesting insights on the current status and future of young adult literature.  Even though it was a small event compared to the larger library conferences that I've been to in the past, there was also still a great variety of breakout sessions.

I went to one session put on by Baker & Taylor (our book vendor) where they described their new platform for ebooks and e-audio.  It seems like a really cool program, so I'll be interested to see if we decide our library should have it.  My next session was about the Common Core standards being implemented in Indiana schools.  It was mostly intended for school librarians, but they did give a lot of resources for meeting the new standards that could be useful for us.

My third breakout session, about storytimes incorporating dance and music, was probably the most useful to me.  I got a lot of ideas for Wee Dance! Parties.  I've already been thinking about doing a "Going on a Bear Hunt" activity, and one of the ideas presented was to tape out a path on the floor for a similar game.  I also can't wait to try out some adult music (like the Beatles or Motown), play "keep the beach ball in the air," use our beanbags and rhythm sticks more, try freeze dancing, do the limbo, and cut out pretend steering wheels from paper plates to use with some sort of car song.  It'll be so fun!

The final session I went to was about using an online system for a summer reading program.  Like the library the speakers were from, we will be using Evanced.  I think it will make things really streamlined to use Evanced for registering and recording patron's reading, so I'm looking forward to it.  I haven't experienced a summer reading program at this library before, though, so I'm not quite sure what to expect!