Beyond the COM: May 2015 Conference Adventures! Part 1

Over the course of the last month or so, most of us in the library have been busily preparing to participate in two big library conferences that occurred one after the other this past week. This year, we were very fortunate to be presenting at both the Florida Library Association’s 2015 Annual Conference in Orlando, FL, and the Medical Library Association’s 2015 Annual Meeting in Austin, TX! This will be a two part recap of our adventures; first up is FLA 2015!

Inspiring Innovation at FLA 2015

Natasha and Shalu at FLA 2015

This year, the Florida Library Association’s annual conference was held at the Caribe Royale in Orlando, FL, from May 12 – 15. It has always been a great conference to attend to get fun new ideas for improving our public services (our Step 1 Survival Coffee Cart actually came about in part because of a session we attended at the 2013 conference!). Further, we can connect with the more traditional side of librarianship we don’t get to hear so much about in the medical librarianship world. We had two of our staff attend, our Public Services Librarian Shalu and myself (hi there, Natasha here!), as well as our colleague Kerry, who recently moved onto a new position out of state.

Because we’re really proud of how our approach to public services has evolved over the past few years, we wanted to share these successes with our colleagues. Back in November, we submitted a proposal to put on an hour long session titled “Keeping It Fun! Innovative Ways to Build Relationships with Library Users”, which was accepted! It was a lot of fun to show everyone how much we enjoy working with all of you, and how your feedback is vitally important to how we operate and improve on the services we provide. We had quite the packed house, too!

Of course, we can’t talk about our services without mentioning Popcorn Day. We all had a good laugh about how well-received this particular event is. Check out this video below that our co-worker Raney put together especially for this portion of the presentation!

Overall, FLA 2015 was a good time. We had a chance to sit in on a variety of sessions, from website traffic data analyzing, to making use of 3D printers. We had a few tweets over on our Twitter account throughout the conference under the hashtag #flacon2015 if you’d like to check those out.

Next week, we’ll have Part 2 of this post; our recap of the trip to Austin, TX for the Medical Library Association’s meeting!