New York Library Association (NYLA) Conference
November 2022
The good vibes of the Back to the Future, NYLA Conference, in Saratoga Springs started with the keynote address by Courtney Harge, The Beautiful Revolutionary Future. Her thoughts as we heard them were thought-provoking, and as we moved through the conference they continued to resonate and thread their way through the workshops and author talks. The highlights for me were the opportunity to network with library colleagues, meet up with vendors and hear authors share details about their writing. I was able to network with colleagues across systems. One minute I was speaking with a fellow Mid York Public Library Director and along came a librarian that works with construction grants from another public library system to add her thoughts to the problem at hand. Synergy! I spent some much-needed time discussing our future construction grant with our architect, a conference vendor. The best was the Intellectual Freedom Breakfast speaker, Laura Halse Anderson. She shared statistics illustrating the increased requests to ban her books and others. She brought the audience from the current reality, bolstered and praised us, and then encouraged us to fight the good fight of protecting everyone’s freedom of speech!
April Bliss
Library Director, Dunham Public Library
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