This was an immensely valuable event overall, and it highlighted a lot of important topics and discourse specific to libraries in rural settings — something I’ve found to be difficult to find in the larger conferences and webinars put on by the American Library Association, or other such monoliths in the profession.
The topics of community engagement in particular were invaluable, and several of the panels I attended spoke to specific areas of engagement that our library could act on — the sciences, health and wellness, financial literacy, and media literacy.
Because this conference took place online in the middle of a global pandemic, quite a lot of attention was also given to virtual programming. It’s been helpful to have additional metrics for gauging what does and doesn’t work well for rural library users in virtual programming environments, and that’s something that will be continually useful even after virtual settings become less essential.
A few smaller, less broadly applicable areas of interest I attended at ARSL — the topics of eSports in libraries (our library’s teens might love this) and social media management for rural libraries. I’ve been spearheading a lot of social media engagement expansion for the Marshall-Lyon County Library, but similar to what I said above, it can be difficult to find resources for rural libraries, specifically. Much of the literature that’s been published about public library usage of social media pertains to much larger organizations than ours, so the information I gained at the ARSL conference was more directly applicable.
