I spent the better part of last week in Minneapolis, MN at the Public Library Association National Conference.  There was a lunch with Nancy Pearl, dinner with my fellow readers' advisory lovers from fiction_l and workshops, workshops, workshops.  Other librarians toured the many exhibits, looking for software, funiture, etc. to better serve our customers, but I was there for the workshops (and the free books).  To see the handouts from the workshops, check out www.placonference.org/handoutspage.cfm.

Workhop 1: Why Do We Dewey: Redesigning Libraries by Learning from Retail

This may have been the most useful workshop I went to.  It's always good to start out with a bang, and this was it.  The basic idea behind the talk was that Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library (TSCPL) noticed it's adult nonfiction circulation dropping.  They wanted to find a way to help get books in the hand of those people who wanted them by making browsing easier.  Going completly to a bookstore model has its problems.  Especially for a large library, the bookstore model makes finding a SPECIFIC BOOK difficult.  It also makes browsing a more specific subject difficult--try going to Barnes and Nobel and finding a section on Victorian History in England when British History is alphebetical by author.  TSCPL experimented with a comprimise, which they called "neighborhoods."  The are within the area of the stacks, but distinct and made easier to browse with slightly different organization and lots of signage.

An example: travel

Before you go on a trip, you want a travel guide and (if you are headed out of the country) a foreign phrase book.  While planning a trip, you might want books on campsites, B&B's, RVing, and traveling with children.  While most of these things are in the 910s, not all of them are.  Phrase books are in the 400s, B&Bs in the 600s, and so on.  This is not conducive to browsing.

So, TSCPL gathered all books related to travel into one location in the library (after their 800s ended and before their 900s began).  They created a new collection code (travel) and put it at the front of all the call numbers.  Phrase books still had 400 level call numbers, but with a new collection code (Travel 4XX.XX).  They cleaned out old stuff in travel which should have been moved long ago when Dewey numbers were changed (Lewis and Clark stuff for example) and recatalogued it all to return it to where it now belongs.  They have other cataloging notes on their website, including eliminating duplicate headings.

When someone is looking to browse travel books, they can find a section on phrase books, travel guides by location, travelogues, and travel advice all in one place.  Librarians get to keep their Dewey number and (more importantly) shelf address for finding specific books and the collection is easier to browse.  Within the neighborhoods, TSCPL makes displays, uses a lot of signage, and some other fun tricks.  They have gotten a lot of positive feedback.  My main question was where these neighborhoods would go.  My understanding is that they would fit within the dewey stacks--so the Gardening neighborhood (gardening and landscaping or 600s and 700s) would go between the 600s and the 700s.

It sounds like a great idea.

Workshop 2: Making Cities Stronger: Public Libraries' Contributions to Local Economic Development

This was a summary of an Urban Libraries report and study done on behalf of UL by the Urban Institute.  There were some great gem of ideas hidden in this presentation.  Mostly, I think this is more useful to remind mayors and county commissioners that in an economic downturn libraries can do a lot of work to turn a community around including helping improve the labor force and being an attractive local resource for companies looking to move.  Libraries put more into the economy than tax payer put in.

The gems:

• Read-to-me:  A volunteer goes to the local prison and tapes a prisoner reading a book to their child.  The child gets the book and the tape of their parent reading to them.  When the prisoner's time is up, they also provide literacy, parenting, and other materials to the parent to help them make the transition back to parenting,.
• Job fair for teens (it looks like the Durham County is running one this year)

Workshop 3:  The Reader Advisor's Toolkit--episode 3

Really the readers' advisory workshops I went to were just a treat for me, more than anything else.  When I get to do RA, I think "they pay me for this?"  Not that I want to not get paid mind you...

The first part of this workshop was on promoting your backlist through displays, RA, and brochures.  Mostly, this one just reminded me that we need better display furniture at DCL.  Because our a-frame's rely on large banners, we can't make a display "on the fly" as it were.  If we had smaller display furniture, staff on the floor could make displays without needing a month's notice.  Our current a-frame's also need a lot of books to look full, something smaller could be full with 20 books and we could make really random (and interesting) displays.

The second part of this workshop was on genre study.

The third was on keeping up with what's going to be hot tomorrow, including keeping up with library awards, what bookstores are going to promote soon, what publishers are going to promote, what fans are talking about, and what's going to be on TV.  There are a ton of websites on the handouts.  The best part of this talk was this advice--look over all the websites on the list.  Pick 5 or 6 you like to read regularly.  Ignore the rest.  You'll never catch every "The Secret" that comes out of the blue, but you also won't be overwhelmed with websites so that you can't do any other work.

Workshop 4:  Nonfiction RA--when the story is true

This manages to be both my area of interest and my area of work, which is always a nice mix!