The Soldotna City Council passed an ordinance Wednesday night that commits the city to fund any costs beyond $3,000 for two librarian conferences.
Soldotna City Librarian Rachel Nash says furthering library employee educations is instrumental in continually bettering their public services.
Nash: “Librarianship is a profession, which many people just think of books but there’s a lot of things going on behind the scenes from the programming and early childhood development to supporting basically life needs at every stage. We just try to support people so we just try to do that better. These conferences really help us to do that better, to get ideas from others, to give ideas to others, it’s a great way to collaborate.”
The State of Alaska granted the Soldotna Library $3,000 for furthering librarian educations and the ordinance approved by the council commits the city to pay for any costs above and beyond that.
The $3,000 was for Fiscal Year 2016, so in October one employee was sent to the Association for Rural and Small Libraries in Little Rock Arkansas. The other conference, hosted by the Public Library Association, will be in Denver, Colorado, in April.
The conferences were allotted $1,500 each from the state grant and the first conference’s costs in Little Rock totaled around $2,130.
Nash says in the past they have cancelled conferences if the costs exceed the grant amount by too much but the conferences are very important.
