2024 Core Forum

How can a renovation include marginalized and emerging communities? Can a larger collection actually limit inclusion? Learn techniques from the private sector - retail and restaurants - that help you understand the needs of diverse communities, plan space for inclusion, analyze circulation efficiency and avoid zone conflicts.

Registration:
Core Members - $119
Minnesota Library Association Members - $119
Non-Members - $149

If you’re in senior or middle management, you know the necessity of effective strategic planning and implementation, but what should you do if your go-to planning model doesn’t reflect our current trends and challenges? ALA’s For Results series has an enduring, widespread impact on elevating library services, but the foremost trends of EDI, operating in a divisive sociopolitical climate, and resetting after a global pandemic are absent in its 20-year-old text. Using the Strategic Planning for Results’ methodology as a starting point, we’ll explore:

• identifying and integrating equity, diversity, and inclusion into existing process and product;
• improving clarity of messaging and services to stakeholders and your broader community, starting with strategy;
• developing infrastructure to support ethics-affirming behavior with your staff; as well as
• connecting with community and capturing feedback to build inclusive service and facilities plans

Learn how these approaches can revitalize your planning and implementation process to meet the challenges of tomorrow, starting today. Don’t abandon your strategic planning model, adapt it!

Registration:
Core Members - $119
Minnesota Library Association Members - $119
Non-Members - $149

E-resources are a central part of the services provided by academic libraries, but getting them to work with each other, or just getting them to work, is often a significant challenge. From access questions to failed inter-resource connections, from miserable metadata to discovery layer concerns, plus platform migrations, limited branding, and much more, it can be nearly impossible to ensure resources are discoverable and are properly connecting with each other. This preconference will investigate the problems that limit or prevent access, address tools to fix what can be fixed, understand what cannot and how (if possible) to work around it, and explore a potential cooperative solution to manage this issue. Just knowing that a problem exists can be incredibly difficult in many instances. Trying to figure out what’s causing that problem, then trying to solve these problems, will take even more time. In this preconference, those with responsibilities for e-resources will get a sense of what might be causing the problems they’re experiencing, and how they might be able to fix those problems. Attendees may want to bring a laptop so they can research, investigate, address and solve problems during the session.

Librarianship, along with other public service and care professions, is facing a self-care crisis. While all levels of a library’s organizational chart are susceptible to burn-out in our challenging climate, a significant pressure is placed on managers to look out for their employees and hold everything together. This workshop is designed to assist library leaders who are struggling with burn-out, harsh inner critics and imposter syndrome. The workshop will be a mini-retreat wherein the participants will engage in facilitated conversations, journaling, and guided meditations to develop compassion for themselves and build resiliency in community with other library managers.