This was my first time attending a Minnesota Library Association Conference. The sessions I attended mostly focused on youth programming and collection development. One of my favorite sessions was Out-of-the-Box Book Clubs. One of the presenters runs a book club where everyone reads a book based on a theme, rather than reading the same book. Picking a book that is both of interest to everyone and has enough copies available can be a problem and a theme-based book club is a nice solution. I went to a couple sessions that were about coding in the library. One of those sessions focused on coding for preschoolers and highlighted how some things we do in storytime are already helping kids learn pre-coding skills. It gave me some ideas for games or activities to use during storytime or ways to be more intentional about the skills we’re learning. For collection development, I attended a session about under the radar youth book awards and another about MN American Indian children’s literature. Both sessions gave me some great resources, from new awards to check out to a list of vetted titles that support MN’s curriculum standards on American Indians. This conference was also a great opportunity to see some colleagues from Plum Creek and connect with other youth services librarians from across the state.
