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On Friday, Oct 12th, I had the good fortune to attend and present at “The 2018 Conference for Entrepreneurial Librarians” at Wake Downtown! In spite of the widespread power outages from Hurricane Michael, most of the presenters and attendees made it to this awesome conference! The keynote speaker, Patrick Sweeney, Political Director for EveryLibrary (@everylibrary) spoke on “Big Data, Advocacy, and Return on Investment” He discussed how the underlying political theories that apply to campaigns can be leveraged by libraries to build community support.  He also showed us data that illustrated how voters can be in favor of libraries and still vote against them. I’m now following him on Twitter (@PCSweeney) and looking into ZSR purchasing his book “Winning Elections and Influencing Politicians for Library Funding”

I was thrilled to have the opportunity to present on “Writers’ Camp @ ZSR” and to attend a session on library partnership with multicultural programs, and a library’s efforts to form a Living Learning Community (LLC). Additionally, the afternoon keynote, Timothy Owens, Assistant Librarian of the State of North Carolina, taught me several things I didn’t know both about our State Library, and about leveraging data.

Finally, a shout out to the entire planning committee, and specifically our ZSR Librarians from the committee, Mary Beth Lock, Kathy Shields, and Mary Scanlon. They packed a great conference into one day, full of amazing content, at an awesome venue (Wake Downtown), with excellent food (Camino Bakery, and The Porch).