Tuesday, April 8, 2014

In a world filled with turbulent change, are libraries keeping pace? Are they innovating and engaging their communities with all the opportunities available? Are they choosing the right focus and priorities? Hear from an innovative library practitioner with experience in special, academic, and public libraries and a reputation for hacking and creating new environments and experiences for community audiences. Get insights, ideas, tips. and challenges for hacking and transforming your library!

Overwhelmed by the thought of creating a mobile app? Hear how one library made its subscribed resources easily available to very busy professionals in many locations on their tablets or phones. Providing easy access to resources on the go, using a mobile device of choice, was accomplished with a combination of responsive web design, an authentication platform, and a formula to pack library subscriptions. Responsive web design was used to make the library webpage mobile friendly, serving as a portal for their app package. The authentication platform (EZproxy + Ex Libris PDS + Active Directory) ensures that the library’s users securely identify themselves as IDB members, granting them access to the resources without the need to create new personal accounts. The formula to pack library subscriptions is a tiny HTML file that just needs a cool logo for the app and the address of the subscribed resource. Speakers illustrate their formula and discuss both the technical aspects of the webpage design and the strategies of outreach and simplification of the process for users.

Innovation centers have been formed in many public and academic libraries. However, there are no known case studies to date of federal libraries creating innovation centers. The NIST Research Library has begun implementing an innovation center to provide its scientists with space, tools, and resources for innovative experimentation that they may not have available in their labs. Tools and resources include 3D printers, data visualization software and displays, and collaboration areas. Hear about their beginning steps, the challenges and opportunities faced, and current resources and services, as well as future plans. Bruss shares customer response to the innovation center and best practices learned.

From content aggregation tools and tips for improving your current awareness programs to tools for curation and analytics, Keiser shares her expertise. Using the technique he created to train reluctant librarians to conduct patron needs assessments, Liebhardt shares the secrets of conducting successful interviews for staying close to your customers. Chronister and Rubin provide insights into improving websites and services through user-centered design and explain how to create your own usability testing program on a shoestring budget.

Clayman and Bolls describe how their EPA library team enhances user interaction with innovative customer resource management. The librarians supervise the content management system that 26 EPA Offices use to manage their own knowledgebases of frequently asked questions and customer interactions. They share tools and techniques for providing improved access and superior customer service.

Holley-Harris talks about lessons learned by one of the DoJ’s libraries on marketing new technologies and engaging users. She covers the benefits of selling new ideas/technology to the library staff before selling the patron, how great turnaround times often trump the technology, and giving technology presentations in under 10 minutes.

Big Data is presenting all industries with challenges but also opportunities to successfully process and organize all this information into something meaningful and comprehensible. Hear how Szkolar’s involvement in information repository building and management provides a successful, competitive advantage. As the DigiTech database manager, she oversees the creation, management, and content curating for an internal repository of digital advertising technologies. She discusses expanding how we define librarianship as a profession (not just saying it) in order to recognize innovation and encourage contribution to data repositories and data projects outside the traditional library framework. Sommers and Goldstein discuss leaving behind everything you know (and are good at, and recognized for!) to create a new identity in the library. Technology is changing work in the NPR Library. Those who have been around the longest are also doing the most to hack new identities that include very few of the activities that defined their earlier careers. Hear how they are surviving and thriving! Hear about the process of leaving reference and cataloging to develop a new product for NPR and how an earlier career in a rock band has helped ease a late career transition. Learn how new product managers are coached to imagine, create, and succeed in new roles. Speakers touch on culture-changing techniques; innovative libraries, practices, and services; alignment with strategic priorities of their organization; creative management practices; making tough choices; and more.

In a world filled with turbulent change, are libraries keeping pace? Are they innovating and engaging their communities with all the opportunities available? Are they choosing the right focus and priorities? Hear from an innovative library practitioner with experience in special, academic, and public libraries and a reputation for hacking and creating new environments and experiences for community audiences. Get insights, ideas, tips. and challenges for hacking and transforming your library!

User experience professionals know how to develop sites to be user-friendly.Web developers know how to accommodate technology. But how do we architect websites and individual documents that accommodate both users and technology? In this session, learn how to successfully combine information architecture and a corresponding technical architecture for multiple devices (desktop/laptop computers, tablets, mobile devices), no matter where and how searchers look for your content. Topics of discussion include the do’s and don’ts of labeling content; what’s best for your mobile site: responsive design, dynamic serving or dedicated URLs; how to avoid common (and costly) architecture, navigation, technical, and design mistakes; and proven findability tips and techniques for long-term results.

After redesigning their website to incorporate responsive design, the Camden County Library System decided to take it one step further and develop mobile apps for iOS and Android. They describe the process of determining the features of the apps, development, testing, and making the apps available to customers. Get the steps to do this in your system and grow your own apps for both platforms. Betz discusses how her library embarked on a dramatic re-visioning of their online space. Instead of sending students out into the scary (and not so user-friendly) world of disparate vendor user interfaces, they began using commercial and home-grown APIs to keep students wthe library in a fully integrated and customized web environment. They developed a fully-featured iOS app that integrates APIs and web services from Ebsco Discovery Service, Sirsi Symphony, and the Atlas Ares eReserves software. She talks about the big benefits of keeping Library users "in-house."

Hear how one large public library system migrated from Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint to Google Apps for Education and, in the process, came to save a lot of time and money. Speakers discuss the challenges faced by any organization when moving their email and intranet infrastructure. Issues such as training, resistance to change, and the fear of Google and clouds in general are discussed. Also highlighted are unexpected areas of return, such as replacing WebEx with Google Hangouts, the collaborative nature of Google Drive, and how these two features have resulted in higher-functioning teams, less travel, and more face-to-face time in a widely dispersed work environment.

In this fast-paced session, speakers share their usability methods and results as well as how they used the information to create user-centered experiences.With its latest website re-design, move to WordPress as a content management system, and focus on the student user, Adelphi U shares the mistakes and successes in conducting two usability studies and offers valuable (and quite surprising) tips on how to hold productive usability studies. Includes lots of practical advice, and a top-secret technique to use in focus groups that is guaranteed to speed up the design process and focus on the student user. Fox discusses starting with surveys of students and faculty/staff to begin tweaking a weak web design, which put her library on the path of a long-term major usability testing program. She shares lessons learned, as well as the methods, statistics, and statistical programs used. Providing effective and usable online interfaces for customers, especially for those libraries supporting distance education (DE) students, is a challenge. Hear about how one library focused on these users with a shared web portal; the redesign and consolidation of the libraries’ catalog, database lists, and other search tools, including the discovery tool Summon; and a fully restructured and standardized search widget. Tips for interdepartmental and interlibrary collaboration, particularly negotiating compromises that meet the needs of diverse user groups are presented.

While responsive design and dedicated mobile websites have helped to make libraries more accessible on handheld devices, there often still exists a disconnect between the library’s mobile website and the databases and ejournals to which it provides access. Some databases, such as those provided by EBSCO, detect mobile devices and automatically serve up a mobile-friendly version. Others are not so simple, often requiring detailed instructions, the creation of accounts, and the downloading of separate applications. How then, can libraries present this information in a manner that is easy for patrons to understand while also being constrained by limited screen real estate? Hear how one library has hacked the “App Store” model to market library database apps in a manner familiar and intuitive to smartphone and tablet users. The Himmelfarb “App Store” allows the library to display apps by browsable categories and highlight newly available apps, all using eye-catching icons. Using a mobile, touch friendly-interface, users can swipe and tap to choose an app, pull up any special instructions, and down- load the app to their mobile devices just as they would install the latest version of Angry Birds.

In a world filled with turbulent change, are libraries keeping pace? Are they innovating and engaging their communities with all the opportunities available? Are they choosing the right focus and priorities? Hear from an innovative library practitioner with experience in special, academic, and public libraries and a reputation for hacking and creating new environments and experiences for community audiences. Get insights, ideas, tips. and challenges for hacking and transforming your library!

This session profiles two case studies of libraries solving problems by working directly with content providers. In Canada, the public libraries have been hamstrung by publisher problems with ebooks. The Canadian Urban Libraries Council and Association of Canadian Publishers have worked together, forming the CULC/eBOUND eBook Task Force, and to jointly seek a vendor to support a mutually beneficial solution. Meanwhile, Iowa City Public Library was hampered without a downloadable music collection but wasn’t happy with commercial options for offering digital music content to patrons. So it decided to offer local music talent for download. Using a simple contract local musicians lease ICPL the rights to their albums for 2 years. Albums are stored on a local server and made available for download as a zip file containing either MP3 or Ogg Vorbis file options. The Local Music Project fosters community by supporting local artists as well as the businesses they perform in. Hear the results and approaches of these two cases from which all libraries can learn and benefit.

As our users become increasingly accustomed to rapid response services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime, they’ll expect similar service speed and flexibility from us. Yale Law Library’s response is the suite of on-demand services to improve user experiences and improve collections and access processes. Some on-demand services have built on work underway at other academic libraries, while others are entirely original in concept and practice. Boeninger recognized that students have trouble using the general or generic guides so common in academic libraries to address their specific research questions. So he creates topic-specific blog posts and videos that students use in the context of their specific assignment or study needs. Because these posts and videos are topic-specific, they are easily found using Google, and Boeninger distributes them to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and iTunes. Learn the tools Boeninger and Aiken are using as they rethink traditional services.

The public library field is a bounty of data—the annual Public Library Survey (IMLS), Impact Survey (UW), Public Library Funding and Technology and Access Study (ALA/UMD), Edge Initiative, and other initiatives routinely collect data about what libraries provide for their communities and how patrons benefit from their resources and services. Mashed up with community data from the U.S. Census and other sources, the possibilities for playing with data are endless! Come see how researchers at the University of Washington Information School have been mashing up these data and looking for relationships between resources, patron outcomes, and community characteristics. They provide ideas about how you can do library data mashups of your own using community data together with data you are already collecting or can easily gather. The UW team unveils the beta version of GloPlug, their online data analysis tool built on the powerful new Shiny for R application. GloPlug lets librarians play with library data through a friendly interactive app and instantly produce easy- to-understand graphs and charts. See how your library stacks up against other libraries in communities like yours, how libraries divvy up their budgets, or just explore the data and get a new perspective on what libraries do.

Inform data-driven decision making by using an online dashboard to easily collect, organize, and share valuable library statistics. Each year, the staff at Simmons College Library generates statistical reports based on the previous year’s library services and collection development. Recently, college-wide assessment has become more important to informing its projects and day-to-day work. As part of this initiative, the library has developed a thoughtful data collection strategy using Zoho Creator as a statistics management tool. The library plans to share statistics with patrons and stakeholders through a lightweight, dynamic online dashboard built to visualize data stored in a Google spreadsheet using Sheetsee.js. Come see a preview of its online dashboard and learn how you can implement a similar strategy at your library.

The consolidation that created Cornell University’s Hospitality, Labor, and Management Library (HLM) led to new opportunities and challenges for the HLM Digital Projects Group, none larger than recreating the success of DigitalCommons@ILR, the ILR School’s digital repository, in support of the School of Hotel Administration. The cultures, subject matter, and audiences differed greatly enough between the schools that simply expanding the first repository was not an option; and the success of DigitalCommons@ILR—18,000 documents, 7 million full-text downloads, 66% faculty participation—made for some very high expectations. DelRosso talks about the creation of the Scholarly Commons and the lessons learned not only about digital repositories, but also about using digital projects to enhance outreach to new communities.

In a world filled with turbulent change, are libraries keeping pace? Are they innovating and engaging their communities with all the opportunities available? Are they choosing the right focus and priorities? Hear from an innovative library practitioner with experience in special, academic, and public libraries and a reputation for hacking and creating new environments and experiences for community audiences. Get insights, ideas, tips. and challenges for hacking and transforming your library!

Change is part of any evolution especially in library culture with technology. To transition successfully from one’s current state to a better state takes many steps in planning. Together we explore the eight steps that are needed to get from the beginning of any change to it’s achieved!

Hear how two libraries, one public and one academic, changed the culture of their libraries, created new and inspiring spaces, and continue to be innovative in the way they are engaging their communities.

When your financial model shifts, you have to rethink, be flexible and agile, and change. Hear how one library responded to the migration to a resource centered management (RCM) financial model, a decentralized approach to budget allocation that assigns greater control over resource decisions to academic colleges and deans. Under the new RCM model, the library receives its funding directly from the contributions of the colleges, rather than from a centralized budget pool. Boeninger shares the results of a task force analysis of library expenditures, the types of data gathered, and how it was used to showcase the value of the Library to campus decision makers. Becoming one of the leaders of technology required not only a new website, an evaluation and addition of several e-resources, introduction of tablet/e- reader/laptop loaning programs, adoption of social media as both a marketing tool and a communication resource, but also a culture change for staff at Guelph PL. Fast-paced learning and constant transitions were expected in this unionized environment. Hear the good, the bad, and the ugly in the process of training the untrainable staff and get lots of tips and tricks to help change happen in your library.

Teams are the basis of most organizations these days, whether for development or day-to-day practices. Get tips from two libraries in how to enable high-performing teams. Colt and Martini-Lyons share how the roles that designers, librarians and programmers are playing in the new library catalog implementation process were established, including the cross-discipline team structure to improve communication, and how a new model for culture change helped to achieve success in the initiative. Druda and Johnson, bridge builders in their libraries, share strategies and provide tips on how to get IT and reference working together in a solid partnership.

Shuping discusses how often when we’re working on a project we want that one more piece: that piece of data, that graph, the right wording, and so on, just so that everything will be perfect. But here’s the thing: Perfection can be more harmful than good. It’s a lesson that artists have to learn early on, because that one more thing can destroy everything. And the same is true in the library world. One more thing can delay a project, destroy confidence, and more. Come to this presentation to find out more about when good … is good enough.

In a world filled with turbulent change, are libraries keeping pace? Are they innovating and engaging their communities with all the opportunities available? Are they choosing the right focus and priorities? Hear from an innovative library practitioner with experience in special, academic, and public libraries and a reputation for hacking and creating new environments and experiences for community audiences. Get insights, ideas, tips. and challenges for hacking and transforming your library!

We can view the changes coming down the road as obstacles or opportunities. How can teacher librarians harness the trends of 2014 to ensure that learners at all levels grow as literate/transliterate citizens? From a better understanding of intellectual property to best tools and strategies for curating content, flipping instruction, telling stories, and communicating new knowledge, Valenza counts them down and reveals granular strategies for inspiring participation and learning.

The Game Design and Programming Club at Davis Middle School in Maryland is an after-school club that creates an environment of creativity and friendship through the active roles taken by its members as they design, create, edit, and distribute 2-D video games. Led by the school librarian, this club extends the use of the technology resources of the media center as the middle school students get practical experience with intellectual property. Using the program Game Maker as the creative environment, informal instruction is combined with focused discussion on the creation of playable mini-computer games. Intellectual property is reinforced through club policies that allow club members to only use the material they create as pieces of their games (images, sound, story-line, etc.). With their own work as a focus, presentations are given that help the students explore copyright, fair use in terms of their own work, and the Creative Commons.

Looking for ways to use apps in your libraries? Want to embed Library 2.0 resources in teacher-friendly ways? This panel of school librarians highlights successful implementations and offers strategies for overcoming Library 2.0 challenges. Topics include curating ebooks and apps, app-based research projects, and embeddable tools such as Live- Binders. Using real-world examples, three librarians share their insights, strategies, and tips, providing practical guidance as well as provocative, philosophical conversation.

The information and technology needs of today’s teachers and students are increasing in the digital world, and school librarians play an essential role in meeting those needs. Although the impact of today’s school librarians on student learning is evident to those closest to the field, it is important that librarians have essential skills to be leaders in the world of digital learners and to be prepared to advocate for their programs. This interactive session includes practical steps to build knowledge and collaboration and presents a variety of methods to communicate the value of school library programs to colleagues, administrators, and other stakeholders in the school community.

Join a well-known expert on the vital subject of finding free educational resources online. Veteran web resource locator Gary Price discusses discovery and finding tools, techniques, and even the necessary mind-set you need to unearth the best digital content for education—so you can serve up just what’s needed for that social studies or history class, just when it’s needed. 

In keeping with our theme, Hack the Library!, our panel shares experiences and tips for both people and places associated with libraries. D’Elia starts by sharing a framework and techniques for encouraging a start-up mindset and the results of the first Start Up Weekend for Libraries. Hill & Backus describe the transformation of the Chatanooga PL’s fourth floor and the innovative maker spirit it initiated. Boekesteijn, creator of the video series This Week in Libraries, illustrates exciting new spaces that libraries are creating and provides lots of insights and ideas to take home to your library and community.

Digital storytelling has been used often for educational purposes, as well as for presenting public or personal events or even biographies. Short storytelling has a great potential for advertising purposes of many services or resources in the libraries. This cybertour shares ideas that have been utilized in library digital stories, and discusses other uses of digital stories in the library world.

Systems and IT specialist for libraries, Cervone shares the six technologies that will affect your library this year.

This cybertour discusses the changing results from studies of academic library practitioners. The first in 2007 found that user characteristics and learnability were the top two Web usability attributes. The follow-up study in 2011 showed library practitioners’ emphasis on Web usability had changed to interface/design and effectiveness. Get practical strategies and methods on how libraries can address Web usability with mobile and innovative devices, and useful techniques for thoughtful Web design and quality Web usability testing.

Collaborating with scholars or colleagues, or to manage a project, requires infrastructure. This cybertour presents an overview of current popular collaboration tools and their advanced features, especially those which are free or open source meaning they are readily available: Google Docs, Draft, Primarypad, My Simple Surface, Titanpad, and more. Filled with lots of tips and tricks.

Today’s digital “gathering places” include popular hangouts like Facebook and Twitter, and many libraries are there, too. King discusses why libraries use those sites, which sites are important, how much time should be spent there, and what strategies can be used to turn them from an interesting toy to useful tool.