SLA Conference 2022 Recap

Last weekend saw the return of the pilgrimage of school librarians from all over the UK and beyond to the SLA’s annual conference, this year in Kent’s Ashford International hotel. The SLA conferences are considered by many to be the high point of a school librarian’s year, and are a fantastic weekend crammed to the brim not only with inspirational speakers and sessions, exhibitors, proof copies aplenty of brand-new books about to land in the kids’ lit world, but also a chance to be surrounded by professionals who understand your role and the difficulties you face as part of it. 

Accessit Library were proud to be once again exhibiting at the SLA conference, although this time even more proudly as in-person co-sponsors of the whole event! It’s great to be able to support events like this and make sure they continue to happen. We were joined on the stand on Friday and Saturday by our very own Author in Residence, Matt Dickinson, who also joined us on stage for our presentation on Behind The Scenes with Accessit Library where we spoke about our passion for reading, literacy and supporting school libraries both as a whole team and as individuals within the team. If you haven’t yet explored Matt’s creative writing videos for KS2 and KS3 on our Customer Portal you can find them here.

Happy as we were to be back in swing of things, we were even more blown away by the sheer number of librarians who visited our stand as a priority just to say things like “We already have you in the library and we love you!”, “We’re so glad we’ve got you in place, we should have moved sooner” and “We’re coming on board this summer and we’re so excited!”. There was lots of good feedback for us not just about the way the system has refined and streamlined workflows for librarians and been integral in hugely engaging students, parents and staff to build and strengthen whole-school and beyond reading cultures, but also and rightly so for our exceptional Support Librarians and IT team.  

Our fantastic resources created by our design team also went down really well, with lots of compliments, especially for the information literacy poster and the activity sheets. If you didn’t pick any up at the conference or weren’t able to attend, you can download and print them yourself from our Accessit Library e-Learning Community.

This year’s conference theme was Lifelong Learners: journeys of curiosity, collaboration and imagination; something that resonates strongly with Accessit Library as a company and a library management system and drives the way we look ahead to the future. Our own strapline of Discover – Read – Succeed is a great example of how closely aligned we are. Using Accessit Library in school is, in itself, a journey of curiosity, collaboration and imagination for borrowers and staff. The passion and enthusiasm were infectious, with librarians (and us!) leaving sessions and talks fired up and eager to make more of a difference than ever – the same feeling that lingers after every SLA conference.  

New SLA President Richard Gerver (taking over from the beloved Chris Riddell)’s speech on Saturday night was particularly rousing, and it’s wonderful to see a (former) Headteacher so supportive of and invested in school libraries.  We would love to see his opinions and support emulated by Heads and SLT members across the UK. Until then, Accessit Library will continue to support schools and libraries to the best of our ability. See you next year, SLA conference!