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Congratulations to the ZSR-UNCG team who organized “Inspiration, Innovation, Celebration: an entrepreneurial conference for librarians,” held June 3-4 at the Elliott University Center at UNCG. Wanda, Mary Beth and Mary Scanlon worked hard for over a year and the results paid off! I’m sure they will blog about specific programs. I will give an overview because my job at the end of the conference was to give a few remarks tying it all together.

From the beginning of conference planning, people wondered about the difference between innovation and entrepreneurship. Was money the distinguishing characteristic? In the end after two days of conferencing, I came to the conclusion that it didn’t really matter. What mattered most was encouraging and celebrating creativity and innovation in all forms. And from the number of times ZSR was mentioned throughout the conference, it was apparent that we have achieved some success there.

The three keynote speakers were excellent. Joyce Ogburn from Utah started the conference off by discussing themes of risk management and knowledge management. We met Jon Obermeyer at lunch, who actually works for the WFU Institute for Regenerative Medicine and is thus a resource we can use here. The final keynote speaker was Steven Bell, who is familiar to many of you for his work on the blended librarian.

There were 20 contributed papers that fell into four distinct themes: 1) outreach (both to internal and external audiences), 2) the green movement in libraries (including our own Mary Scanlon and my own Bill Kane), 3) innovative fundraising (with Mary Beth Lock filling in for the virtual Erik Mitchell and Susan Smith) talking about our 5K), and 4) innovation through renovation.

I thought the quality of the programming was very good. Attendance was not quite up to expectations largely due to the global economic collapse and lack of travel funds that no one saw coming a year ago. There is a rumor that we might hold a second conference here at WFU in two years or so. We’ll see…