Our speaker, an architect by training, has been working over the last number of years to make communities and organizations smarter. He shares some strategies and examples on how libraries can take center stage at their community’s “smart cities” journey, as well as support their own digital transformation.

This presentation explains and explores the journey of Baltimore County Public Schools redefined school library program and its path to National School Library Program of the Year 2017 (AASL). Glick shares goals, strategies, leadership, advocacy, and change management to provide support for other school libraries and school librarians looking to redefine and grow their programs and practices.

What does it mean to be a future-ready librarian? How will being a future-ready librarian affect my library, school, teachers, and especially my students? What can I do to become a future-ready librarian today? These questions are central to the Future Ready Librarians initiative and also what we ask ourselves every day as we embrace our roles within the library and school community. Miller explores the critical role that librarians play in the strategic work of schools and educational systems connected with educational technology leadership, empowering students as creators and learners, content curation, innovative instructional practices, collaboration, community connections, and more. She shares stories and inspires us to embrace the change we can bring through our roles as librarians. Leave this presentation knowing you have what it takes to be a future-ready librarian!

The Independent Research Seminar is a unique, personalized learning experience for high school students who are motivated to engage in a rigorous research process for investigating a topic of their own choice. Facilitated by the library media specialist in collaboration with content teachers, students learn collaboratively and independently using resources in an online research framework. Students also have an opportunity to work with an expert mentor in the field of their research and present their research at an annual Student Research Symposium. Educators discover the benefits of this unique course model for a variety of students by hearing their stories and exploring our online research framework, course implementation resources, and Symposium highlights.

Participants learn the basics of creating a coding culture in their library through the use of Dash and Dot robotics, starting with basic blockly code and moving into intermediate skills where conditional statements and algorithms are utilized. Get tips and techniques to make coding happen in your community.

Intrigued by the trend of public libraries lending “things,” this library adapted the idea for the Albemarle High School community. Learn how the library planned, developed, implemented, and marketed its own “Library of Things.”

Join us for tasty bites and drinks as we celebrate the grand opening of the 2018 Computers in Libraries Exhibition. Featuring leading-edge companies, the exhibition offers visitors a choice of products in all aspects of library technology, including webbased products and services, integrated library and information systems, online services, document delivery services, and more.

Positioning today’s libraries as community crossroads for prosperity is a nascent area for digital transformation. Few public resources are as “switched on” to the heartbeat of a community and its economic development than the library— and users don’t just want information, they want actionable intelligence. Our speakers share the insights gleaned from working with more than 30 library systems while experimenting with a library-friendly, purpose-built methodology to deepen the relationships between libraries and the communities they serve by designing and telling more impactful stories which help shape community dialog and library advocacy. Get ideas and insights to use in your library community!

School librarianship has seen renewed interest as a potential corrective to “fake news” and other recent (real and perceived) information literacy failures. The internet has weakened traditional journalism; altered the economics of academic publishing and content production; created new networks of bigotry and disinformation; and, at least in theory, empowered young people around the world with immediate access to information and new tools to share their own knowledge and identities. But by largely hewing to traditional notions of bias, authority, and the nature of academic and civic engagement, school librarians may have reinforced existing inequalities and made themselves less relevant in the world our students will face. Can we transform information literacy instruction to help create the world we want to live in? Join us to discuss disturbing the comfortable, what these changes might look like, and how we can implement them in school libraries.

Beyond Google tricks, Valenza and Boyer share strategies for transforming students (high school, college, and graduate) into thoughtful, playful, and creative researchers. Abraham Maslow tells us: “If the only tool you have is a hammer, treat everything as if it were a nail.” By promoting skills and naming and visualizing classic strategies, students address threshold concepts and assemble a toolkit—understanding when they need a hammer and when a wrench works best. Incorporating ACRL’s frame “Searching as Strategic Exploration,” and AASL’s Shared Foundation of Inquiry, speakers explore search as creative problem-solving and share strategies for moving novice searchers towards agility and expertise.

EBSCO’s User Research team often builds tools based on their research to communicate with stakeholders and development teams. Recently, they’ve worked on a set of K–12 personas, as well as a tool getting more and more attention in the field of user experience. Get an in-depth look at the personas and new tools designed for them.

As we focus increasingly on redesigning libraries as Future Ready spaces, how can we incorporate student voices into our planning and design?  Learn strategies for gathering and incorporating student input using tech tools, design thinking strategies, focus groups, and more.

We most often use the web at the time of need and spend little time building or curating collections from the multitude of open web resources. Building a collection allows us to share potentially useful resources with users. What sources are we missing and how can we find them? Our expert not only shares some of the tools he uses each day to compile INFOdocket but describes the mindset needed to become an open web collector and curator, as well as strategies and tools for keeping track of what you are curating.