Sunday, October 27, 2013

Want to sharpen your web search skills? Find information in the real-time collaborative and social web? Learn from the experts? Join search veterans, speakers, and authors to learn the latest strategies and techniques for searching online. This fast-paced, newly updated, day-long event allows you to interact with the experts, who share their searching secrets and expertise as they focus on the most- current practices in the field of web research. There’s always something new to be learned from these leading- edge panelists. Participants should have basic experience with web searching, but even searchers with an extensive searching background will find tips to polish and advance their skills and will come away with new resources and tools. Academy topics include the following:

• Hidden Tools & Features of the Major Search Engines: Learn about the new and little-known search features of the Big Three.
• Desert Island Databases: What online resources would you consider essential if you were stranded on a desert island?
• Cost-Effective Searching: Learn online strategies/practices for tough times to get the most for your search dollar and your time.
• Searching the Social Web: Find out how to tap into the social web to glean intelligence.
• Searching the Mobile Web: What are the best apps and strategies?
• Subject Search Roundup: Hear from experts on the specific tools and resources for searching in a variety of specialized topics, including health resources.

This full-day, intensive, hands-on workshop is for new and novice Drupal users. It covers Drupal 6 and 7 skills, including installation, configuration, core functions, and theme development. This introductory workshop touches on most every aspect of the core Drupal framework: how to install Drupal and all the modules that a common site would use; adding, editing, and moderating content; creating user accounts and understanding Drupal’s permissions system; setting up menus and other design elements on a page; creating human-readable URLs; categorizing content using Drupal’s taxonomy system; and editing your own Drupal theme. Bring your laptop, and at the end of this Drupal day, you’ll have a simple but complete Drupal site.

Interface stands on the shoulders of infrastructure. User experience relies on the foundation systems of information architecture. And, the biggest problem on the web and in the library is still findability. This half-day workshop covers information architecture from top to bottom, explaining how search and navigation systems (and taxonomies and metadata) can be designed to support and shape user behavior.

• Explore the concepts, methods, and tools needed to practice information architecture successfully.
• Learn how to make your website, intranet, library catalog, or mobile application more useful, usable, accessible, desirable, credible, and findable.
• Understand how information architecture is evolving to accommodate the challenges of ubiquitous computing and cross-channel user experience.
• See best-in-class examples drawn from library, corporate, ecommerce, education, government, and social media websites and applications.
• Discuss with your instructor and fellow attendees the unique challenges you’re facing today. This is an introductory workshop intended for librarians, designers, developers, web managers, content strategists, and information professionals.

What’s a meaningful measure, a measure that really “performs”? It’s a measure that matters to your decision makers and demonstrates that your services are making a meaningful difference to the library’s community, campus, or organization. While Jones has yet to find that “one” magic performance measure during 30 years of working in this sector, she has found, through work with government, academic, public, and corporate libraries, an approach and framework to successfully identify, manage, and communicate measures meaningful to decision makers. Workshop leaders discuss today’s useful measures for communicating value and for operational and management purposes and work with attendees to apply the framework and examples to their situations.

Using results from solid research, including looking at the factors affecting decisions about library funding, Haycock shares the six key principles you need to master to be successful in getting support for your initiatives. Filled with examples of positive use and lack of use of influence, tips and techniques, this workshop provides insights and strategies for moving ahead with the project or initiative that is important to you and your organization or community. You will definitely learn how to get support and get things done!

Is your library actively embedded within your community, engaging customers where they are? This workshop brings both the academic and public library perspectives to developing strategies for actively building relationships with your community. Learn techniques to listen to your community, to discover where they are, and to be introduced to community listening and engaging tools and techniques. Social media, technological outreach, skill development, and interpersonal techniques for engaging in effective and dynamic outreach are discussed, along with a variety of tools, techniques and tips for cementing relationships with customers and clients. This workshop is filled with ideas and tools for connecting your library to your community, in both physical and digital locations.

By setting clear goals and expectations, info pros can make the most of meetings and develop mutually beneficial relationships with content salespeople. Get strategies, tips, and techniques from a long-time salesperson, supporter of libraries, and recent author as well as a librarian who has been on both sides—sales and purchase! Filled with real-life situations and real solutions, this interactive workshop provides practical strategies, tips and tricks for successful negotiations around content purchase and licensing. Be prepared to participate! Bring your latest negotiation frustrations, vendor names not necessary, and get expert views on how it could have resulted in a better ending for the library and how a better plan will help the info pro face future negotiations with more confidence. Workshop leaders provide the tools that you can use in your very next negotiation.

User experience (UX) design is all about understanding user behavior and using that understanding to guide the way we design our systems, interfaces, services, and spaces. UX Boot Camp provides a practical introduction to user experience design work, where you can learn about the principles of UX design and the fundamentals of how to study user behavior. Attendees leave the workshop with sharpened design skills to help them design their website, services, and more

Are you finding needed changes difficult to manage in your library system? Whether the changes are technological, policy, community orientations, reorganizations or other, we meet with resistance—both passive and active. What can help? Whether you’ve been trying to implement a web engagement strategy using multiple social media, reorganized around faculty and community liaisons for service and collection development, implemented a new technology, or anything that requires staff to change methods and behaviors, you’ve experienced the struggles of the change leader. You know there are cultural barriers, education needs, and communication challenges. And you’ve experienced the difficulties of slowness, resistance, and upset co-workers. Worse, you’ve felt the frustration of resistance to ideas which you believe in and that you’ve been tasked with implementing. Workshop leaders have been involved with encouraging and managing both large-scale and small-scale changes for decades. They share some of the strategies and techniques that work. Cultural change is hard, but this transformation that libraries and the world are experiencing makes it necessary for many libraries. Choose this workshop if you need a process and philosophy for change management.

This interactive workshop shares what libraries have done to renovate their spaces, and participants are expected to share their experiences. It discusses the reasons to renovate and change, different innovative methods to do such things, uses statistics, and facts about why and how changing and renovating spaces can improve the collection including forward-facing books shelves, remapping layouts/moving furniture, the need for sitting, and the need for fab labs or hacker spaces. Bring photos of your library, and help us brainstorm ways to improve and change our structures, hopefully all at low costs!

If you want to lead the pack, you need to be planning for lots of different technologies, challenges, and issues. Our leading thinker and practitioner challenges you to think about building strategies and plans for both near- and long-term technology challenges and opportunities. In this interactive workshop, Tennant describes a variety of technologies (e.g., mobile computing, cloud computing, parallel processing), illustrates how these technologies impact libraries, and supplies library examples where they exist. You’ll leave not only with some tools for planning for technological change, but also with a sense of where things are now and where we are headed.

If you’re a casual user of Google Analytics, you know that you’re only tapping the surface of what this tool can do to help you build a better website for your users. If you want to go beyond the out-of-the-box measures and unlock some of the advanced features and customizations available, then this interactive workshop is for you. Topics covered include goals and funnels, events and alerts, tracking non-HTML files, using filters, tracking outbound links, excluding your internal traffic, and more. This workshop assumes some familiarity with the basics of Google Analytics. To get the most out of the workshop, be sure to bring login information for your analytics account and a laptop or tablet so you can try some of these functions yourself!

LibGuides is more than a platform for publishing subject guides and tutorials. With a little understanding of CSS, jQuery, and JavaScript, this platform can be extended into a full-blown web content management system, capable of supporting several critical library needs such as a backend content management system, public website, or even library intranet. Libraries can also incorporate content from other systems using PHP, ASPX, HTML, or other dynamic scripting languages to create an even richer platform. In this hands-on workshop, participants learn how to use the built-in, advanced customization tools of LibGuides and LibGuides CMS (formerly Campus Guides) to remake the interface and extend this platform. Live examples of extending LibGuides are provided. Participants explore how to use CSS, experiment with placing jQuery UI features into their content boxes; bring in external content from other web platforms, including databasedriven content; and learn best practices for dealing with mobile content and in creating admin, test, and production groups to keep public sites polished, code-safe, and the experiments rolling. Learn about best practices and pitfalls to avoid when developing within a hosted system, including developing a sandbox environment and errorchecking techniques. Participants should be comfortable with basic CSS. A brief introduction of jQuery is provided to get users started with sample code. Please bring a laptop with either Firefox or Chrome web browsers installed to participate in the hands-on sections.

Make brainstorming, requirements gathering, and problem- solving easier through facilitation. This interactive workshop shares techniques and exercises to increase the effectiveness of meetings, boost creativity, and stimulate creative and structured problem-solving. Taught by two librarians with formal facilitation training and experience, this workshop gives you theory, hands-on practice time, and feedback. Learn techniques to help groups begin working together and exercises for brainstorming and problem solving on projects. This participatory workshop provides the opportunity to try your hand at facilitation in a supportive environment and receive feedback to improve your facilitation skills. Leave with a toolkit of facilitation skills suitable for use on web and tech projects, and the confidence to use them. These skills can then be used to connect and engage with clients, align services with strategic priorities, and make tough choices.

Join our gamers and gadget lovers for an evening of fun, playing, learning, and networking. See how you can transform your thinking, your programs and your spaces with the latest games, gadgets and ideas! Share with a poster what your library is doing with creative making and MakerSpaces in your library. Led by Brian Pichman, Aaron Schmidt, and Stephen Abram, this event will start your conference experience with lots of learning and laughing! Refreshments included.