I primarily went to MLA this year because I was a presenter on doing Virtual Reality programming for senior citizens. Our program was given many positive reviews and I was told in-person later in the conference that it was extremely valuable to them.
Outside of my presentation, I learned quite a bit about the demographics of library workers in Minnesota, and how we’re lagging behind Iowa and Wisconsin in many areas. I also attended a few sessions on making the library more accessible to neurodivergent people. I attended a presentation on using your local Farm Bureau to help with library programming, which is something I will be looking into for 2026.
Our Ingram rep was present at the conference, so i got to have 30 minutes learning more about ordering from Ingram 1-on-1, which was extraordinarily helpful, since the collapse of B&T forced our hand to switch to Ingram. This was probably the most helpful part of the conference for me, since I had a lot of nuts and bolts questions that would have required dozens of emails, but instead was solved in a few minutes.
Many thanks to Prairielands for making this possible; as a small rural library, I would not be able to attend these conferences.