2019 Fyffe Award Winner: Breanne Kirsch

Western Iowa Academic Libraries Conference

Breanne Kirsch

This past summer, I created a Western Iowa Academic Libraries Conference and invited academic librarians in Western Iowa to attend a day-long conference on June 7, 2019 to share ideas with each other at the Bishop Mueller Library of Briar Cliff University. Since many libraries are having budget decreases or do not have enough of a budget to encourage professional development among library faculty and staff, I felt that it was important to offer a free conference.

The Richard Fyffe Award allowed me to offer a catered lunch from Qdoba. During the morning, one or more speakers from each library had the opportunity to have discuss projects or services in their libraries that they wanted to share with attendees.

After lunch, we broke up into three groups including directors, public services librarians, and technical services and library staff to discuss questions and issues related to different parts of the library. We received overwhelmingly positive responses to this conference and hope we can offer it on an annual basis depending on how COVID-19 affects us meeting face to face in the future. Jenni Breems from Dordt offered to host this year, but it will likely need to be cancelled due to COVID-19. Hopefully we can continue to offer free professional development and networking opportunities amongst Iowa Academic Libraries in the future.