The opportunity to attend the Minnesota Library Association Conference held at Mystic Lake Center in Prior Lake was great! I especially enjoyed the keynote speaker, Steve Simon, Secretary of State for Minnesota on Civic Engagement and Voting. I heard about the tremendous number of people it takes to hold an election and the efforts made to increase voter registration and voting. The workshops I enjoyed the most were “From Amateur to Zealot: Becoming an Effective Library Advocate,” “Connecting Library Transforming Libraries One Community at a Time,” “Minnesota Public Libraries Structures Simplified,” “ELM Input Session: Crafting a new statewide database collection,” “Engaging With Your Community, and the workshop on the Humanities Council. I learned about many new resources available to public libraries, different ways to approach projects, what the different structures of libraries in MN are, ELM database resources and the cycle of selecting and licensing.
