ILA Conference Report

On Oct. 22-23, I attended the Iowa Library Association annual conference along with over 600 library professionals from across the state (and 6 from Luther college), held at Iowa Events Center in Des Moines.

The conference theme was “Deciphering Our Future: Transforming Iowa Libraries,” and a number of sessions related to the changes to the information landscape and to our constituencies over the past 10 years, in large part due to ever increasing access to web resources and collaboration “cloud computing” environments.

One of the challenges for libraries of all sorts, which was sometimes danced around and at other times stated explicitly, is remaining relevant to “digital citizens.” This can mean recognizing that the Internet has been a change-agent for the Information Age, moving us from a culture of information consumption to participation (Lee Rainie), or that we need to be advocates for identifying pedagogies that move past the 19th century practices based on low level factual acquisition (Scott McLeod).