Conference Coverage

The American Library Association’s (ALA) annual conference returns to a live event after a two year run of virtual-only conventions owing to COVID. The in-person event will be held June 23–28 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC. Here is a curated selection of sessions that appealed to the LJ editors who are attending the conference.

Publishers Weekly’s second U.S. Book Show, held virtually May 23–26, will lead off with an all-day track on May 24 specifically for librarians. The Libraries Are Essential program will include a roster of library leaders, educators, and advocates, as well as representatives from the American Library Association (ALA) and PEN America, examining issues currently at the forefront of library work.

If attendees of PLA 2022 needed a good reason to wake up early on the final day of the conference, Amy Schneider’s Big Ideas talk was it. Schneider, a former software engineer, made history from November 2021 through this past January with her 40-game winning streak on Jeopardy!—the most successful woman to compete on the show, with the second-longest run (Ken Jennings, who won 74 games, was the show’s host during her appearance), and the first openly transgender contestant to qualify for the Tournament of Champions.

In the last days of February 2020, the biennial Public Library Association (PLA) Conference wrapped up amid growing concerns over the outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Two years and many virtual events later, the 2022 PLA Conference, held from March 23–25 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, was the first ALA-affiliated conference to reconvene in person.

In the “Fostering Equity and Inclusion by Promoting Employee Wellbeing” session, Ozy Aloziem, equity, diversity and inclusion manager at the Denver Public Library (DPL), detailed the culturally responsive model of employee care that she created and DPL is piloting. 

Collection Diversity audits, while crucial, can present a daunting challenge. What can tip the balance toward deciding the work is worth it is a concrete plan for how the knowledge gained can be directly translated into action. At the “After the Collection Diversity Audit” session at PLA, a mixture of in-person and virtual panelists shared their experiences and strategies.

E-access was a hot topic at the Public Library Association (PLA) 2022 conference, held in Portland, OR, from March 23–25. Programs examining points along the pipeline from licensing to broadband to innovative infrastructure were well attended.

At the 2022 Public Library Association (PLA) Conference, held from March 23–25 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, many of the programs looked at equity work being done throughout the library, including top-down integration into the library’s strategic plan, the creation of dedicated departments and teams, and thoughtful, community-inclusive programming. Here are a few standout sessions attended by LJ editors.

A variety of public libraries shared their hands-on practices for improving and deepening their equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) work at the Public Library Association conference, held in Portland, OR, March 23–25. Among them, the "Queering the Library: Strategically Creating Space for the LGBTQ+ Community" session, presented by Rebecca Oxley and Teresa Miller, librarians in the Prince George's County Memorial Library System, MD, was unusual in that, rather than being led by top leadership, the change was led by branch-level staffers.