ILA 2019 - Poster Sessions

I haven't been to a conference in a few years now, so it was a real treat to spend a day at the ILA conference in Tinley Park this week. Today, I'm going to share some pictures I took from the poster sessions. Of the people I talked to, many said the poster sessions were the breakaway hit of the conference. So many good ones this year!

This was the first one I wanted to see, and you can see some of the ideas they shared below...

This one is harder to see, but it's informal polling the patrons to see what kind of programming they want. Of course, if you don't get enough respondents it's not very useful information, and it may not get new patrons in the library if you only cater to the ones already coming in the building - but efforts like this help make them feel more appreciated.

I would love to have a display board I can change weekly with current event news. I once tried making a weekly newsletter like that, but I couldn't get patrons to pick it up and look at it.

Mini-crafts that take 5-10 minutes sounds great, but I fear I would run out of ideas pretty soon.

I should have asked about this one, as I'm not sure what the difference is between an outreach table and just having staff at the desk.

This one caught me off-guard for how good it was. For one thing, this was just an amazing poster, and a well-presented counter with both handouts and samples.

The novel idea here was to promote reading programs by awarding "badges" (actually buttons) throughout the reading program for reading different things. Instead of competing for a grand prize that most people weren't going to win, everyone won badges and could compete to win the most.

This is a sampling of the badges, and these were free handouts. I took one that was a paintbrush. I'm guessing that was for if I read an artsy book...or maybe something more literally about making art. 

The most exciting part was this claim here at the bottom as to how effective the program was, particularly in terms of increasing circulation. I mean, a 41% increase is practically unheard of! I hope I can talk my library into trying this...