CLiC Spring Workshops is absolutely my favorite conference.

I’ve been to ALA twice (Midwinter once, and Annual once), and it’s AMAZING – like Disneyland. I’m glad I went; I’d love to be in a place where I could afford the time and money to go every year and make it just part of my life, but I’m not sure I’d love to go occasionally, you know? It’s just SO OVERWHELMING.

I’ve been to ARSL once, and it was an absolute blast, and I met so many neat people from so many places. I’d love to do more national-level specialized conferences.

I went to CAL every year for the first few years I was in the profession, and then quit going for a few years, and have been back the last two years. I adore CAL with my whole heart, it is the intellectual highlight of my professional calendar. And also such a source of frustration, as I look at the amazing work being done at bigger institutions with better funding, and try to sift through for the pieces I can use.

I’ve been to a lot of smaller state-sponsored conference and trainings. The ILL services preconference (I don’t go to the main ILL conference, as that’s more geared toward services we don’t have, but I try to go to the SWIFT/CLiC preconference at least every other year); the CAL Paralibrarian spring training; SEALS (Southeast Area Libraries of Colorado) meetings; various committees and users’ groups. I love them all. I love talking to other professionals, learning what they’re doing, sharing what I’m doing, learning, getting feedback and maybe some validation.

But CLiC Spring Workshops is special. It’s the one conference I’ve attended every year of my professional life, and I usually get to attend with a bunch of my coworkers, so we share the experience and take it back home with us and continue to bounce off of it for weeks afterward. It’s geared toward small and rural libraries largely run by paras, so the signal-to-noise ratio is super high; but there are enough participants from big libraries that the exciting cutting-edge work gets an audience too. My institution has always been a huge user of CLiC services (and I started working in libraries in the same year that CLiC was founded) so the organizational targeted stuff is always relevant and valuable, and the inside view of whatever’s coming in the new year is always exciting. Many of my absolutely favorite people in the profession are involved in the running of the conference or are frequent presenters. It’s the one time of the year I see people in neighboring communities that I never get to visit because we’re all so busy, you know, librarying. There’s always a lovely balance between extremely practical workshops and sessions about deeply philosophical stuff.

I always have at least one soul-rattlingly emotional conversation about the direction of my career and life; I always come home shaken. And inspired. And renewed. I just love this conference so much.

Things are so up in the air for me this year that I had the freedom to really just do the sessions I wanted, without a lot of practical consideration for what would be useful in my job (which might not be my job in a month, or six months, or this time next year, or might be less important than what I’m studying or what I’m working on on my own).

This year’s highlights:

The Peter Heller keynote, which was just delightful and delicious. I really need to go read his new book, but more than that, I need to come back to my own writing. (I’m writing right now, okay, Peter? I heard you. I still hear you ringing in my ears. Thank you for speaking the truth that awakens anew.)

Amy Brand’s great workshop about quiet leadership, which is basically validation of every single thing I said here.

Some actual useful context, straight answers, tools, and resources for BIBFRAME after years of “this is coming! Keep up with developments! It’s the future!” but no meaningful WHAT or HOW.

A just heartwarming conversation about professional values and ethics in collection development. Sometimes it’s not about learning something new, it’s about affirming that you’ve been doing it right all along, and teasing out some of the nuances and complexities. I am grateful every single day that my boss shoved a copy of Ranganathan and a copy of the Intellectual Freedom Manual into my hands about five minutes after I started working in a library; I never had a chance to develop wrongheaded ideas to unlearn later, and I’m a better professional and a better person for the values those works instilled in me.

A closing session on positive psychology and the cultivation of happiness and the idea of the library as a catalyst for a “revolution of happiness,” presented by the always wonderful Sharon Morris, based on this TED talk. What a note to end on.

There’s so much work to do right now, and it’s exciting and important and a little overwhelming, but this little side excursion into the theory and the community and everything else that’s going on in the world outside my immediate project slate was so needed, and so worth it.