Jennifer Mabie is the director at the Hawkins Area Library, and she attended her first Wisconsin Library Association Annual Conference this fall, thanks to a scholarship from IFLS (funded by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction with a grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services).  Here are some of her reflections (plus a bonus photo of her in front of the Neville Museum in Green Bay!).

Jennifer with the dinos at the museum

There were so many wonderful things that went on at the conference. One of the sessions that stuck out to me was the Memory Care Kits: Building a Collection for People Living with Memory Loss by Jennie Fidler. Jennie went into great detail about what the kits entailed and even showed us what she has in her kits at her library. The actual hands on the kit materials were a great way for the people to see the exact materials and Jennie told us why she chose each specific item. This was neat to see the different items that were chosen and how the person would use the specific items. The slide show she did was also very informative and gave specific examples for how to build a kit for your library. Jennie did a great job explaining everything and it was a great session for everyone that attended.

Another session I attended that I thought was great was Reaching More Readers with Libby by Kristin Laufenberg. This session went through the whole Libby app and Kristin explained how it worked. She showed us how to look up materials and how to put holds on them. She went through the menu, settings, and notifications area of Libby and showed us how to navigate it and feel more comfortable with Libby. She showed us how to do some of the Libby basics so that we could understand all of that a little better. She showed us how to use the filters, pin them and what they do. This will help when looking for a certain genre or maybe a certain type of material. She also showed us how to get the most out of Libby, this will help when trying to help patrons understand Libby too. I did not know much about Libby before the session and I am amazed at the things you can do with Libby. I will definitely be using it more now after attending this session.

The last session I wanted to talk about was the Neville Museum Tour. This was a great outing away from the conference, but still was part of the conference. The museum was awesome!! I had so much fun looking at the archives and all of the cool artifacts that they have in rooms upstairs that are usually not for the public. We got to see them since we were a part of the WLA Conference and I am so glad that I attended the museum. The different areas we went into were so intriguing and they had so many different items to look at. I think this was where I took the most pictures on my phone because they had so many cool things to look at. I would go back again if I had the chance, it was a great experience!