Want to bring Library Con to your library? Learn how our library held a full day, system-wide library con across three locations. We’ll share our strategy for working with community partners to offer LARP demonstrations, Dungeons & Dragons and other TTRPGs, cosplay demos and miniature painting, a costume contest, and an outdoor movie night. All of this and more to engage new library patrons while highlighting services, programs and collections.
Date Recorded: 2/11/2026
Format: Archived YouTube Video
Presenters: Caele Pemberton, Head of Marketing and Community Engagement and Ben Rutz, Digital Media Coordinator / Kokomo-Howard County Public Library
Learn how our library works closely with community partners to bring fun adventures to our patrons. By working closely with our local game shop, toy store, comic book store, volunteer GMs, a local brewery (the list could go on and on), we’re able to provide an array of fun events related to gaming, filmmaking and more. These events bring new users to the library who sometimes have never set foot inside before. Find out how we make it work and strategies we suggest to work with partners in your community.
Embracing the old saying “the more you know, the more you grow” holds true for Libraries, but with just a little adjusting, “the more you are known, the more you’ll grow.” Expanding outreach allows the community to know and acknowledge the Library as a thriving community service. Using this idea the Floyd County Library Director Melissa Merida will share their library’s expansion of services over the last 5 years through creating unique service locations including an art museum, a digital library branch, and a satellite library in a local college library. Their approach through a low cost commitment to deliver creative outreach points of service without a bookmobile will be highlighted and tools for successful events will be shared . “Our growth in branches, funding and services is not due to any one thing, it is due to staff being committed to dream big and finding a way to say “yes” to community events and partnerships.” Allowing people to SEE the Library in new and unique ways that has people asking for library locations in their neighborhoods. The ideas that will be shared can be duplicated or may inspire your own creativity.
The programming section on the Indiana Public Library Annual Report has always been a bit tricky to navigate – even before recent years saw the addition of virtual programming to the mix. In this webinar, we’ll focus on how to determine if something is considered a program, what statistics to track, and how to break them down for the report. We’ll also address common questions related to programming section and preview the (relatively minor) changes coming in the 2022 report.