Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Our speaker, a journalist, screenwriter, and library advocate, shines a light on a number of projects of direct benefit to libraries seeking to “future-proof” themselves against digital disruption and the prospect of diminished funding through increased community engagement/library advocacy. He shares the Library Digital Relevancy Index. which contextualizes the results of the first industry-wide pilot of libraries examining the degree of digital future-proofing. He describes the PXI: Patron Experience Index—a dashboard platform which weighs and displays multiple strategic community key performance indicators involving libraries in community cultural/prosperity/entrepreneurship initiatives—in order to identify programming, partnership, and learning opportunities for library staff and engage library staff in “begin with the end in mind” creative media and programming processes in support of those identified opportunities. Howley discusses the OpenMedia- Desk (OMD). which pre-validates media prior to publishing online (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) in order to maximize engagement with target communities. He also talks about an open app publishing platform to support “cultural destination tourism,” in which the physical experience of exploring the “community icons” within Hamilton’s central Gore Park is digitally reproduced indoors at Hamilton Public Library’s Central Branch in a high-engagement iPhone experience using beacons—Wi-Fi transducers which trigger, via Bluetooth LTE, “proximity storytelling experiences.” This talk is sure to propel your thinking and insights into action with impact!

Big Data is still Big, especially as a topic in the media, and data scientist landed the top spot on Glassdoor’s “Best Jobs in America” for 2016. We know that data is being compiled at the speed of light, but it can be hard to see how any of it is actually applicable to organization problem-solving and strategy. Moving past the hype of fitness trackers and smart appliances, Affelt takes a look at data science projects in industries where collection, processing, and presentation of data have had a dramatic impact—-pharma, open cities municipal initiatives, education, retail, and of course, libraries. She discusses some user-friendly discovery, analysis, and visualization tools that can be used by info pros to glean real insights from all of this data. The sky is the limit as we channel our inner data scientists to discuss our hopes and dreams in a Big Data world.

This session summarizes how publishers, aggregators, librarians, and end users view the evolving technology, EPUB, an ebook file format with the extension .epub that can be downloaded and read on a variety of devices, and the extent to which they might take an active role in shaping it. It covers: reasons for EPUB’s ascendance among academic publishers and the benefits to end users, how PDF e-books present barriers to innovation and problems for accessibility, findings from a fall 2015 case study at Rasmussen College which sought to test the hypothesis that the demand (and usage) for EPUB ebooks would increase in proportion to the level of awareness of its availability and advantages (it will also cover the surprising pockets of loyalty the researchers found to the PDF format!), findings from EBSCO’s user research regarding full-text linking and e-book formats, promoting EPUB in research instruction, faculty development, and curriculum integration, and more!

After many years of denial and avoidance, the AARP Library embarked on a project to create a staff-use article database for AARP’s flagship publication, AARP The Magazine. They recount the adventure, complete with thorny source material, tales of woe, reaching across the cubicles, XML to the rescue, and ultimately success! They share what they did right, what they wish they’d done differently, the pros/cons of various formatting options, and several unexpected “silver linings” that emerged from the stormy endeavor, shining a spotlight on the library and boosting their engagement and relevance across the enterprise. Hulser discusses making content discoverable through the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), a framework for efforts to provide worldwide access to a variety of biodiversity materials, including those from pre- 17th centuries. While scanning items is a great first start, making older items in particular discoverable through OCR has limited success. Hulser provides an overview of projects focused on the crowdsourcing and gaming techniques engaged by staff at the Missouri Botanical Gardens, the Smithsonian Libraries, and other BHL members to heighten success in access to materials with unusual fonts and handwritten text.

After a year of attending the Computational Text Analysis Working Group at the UC–Berkeley D-Lab, which serves graduate students working in data intensive social science, our informally “embedded” librarian has created new opportunities for the library support of a burgeoning research community. Hennesy defines and gives examples of computational text analysis (also known as text mining), and illustrates why librarians are particularly well equipped to help with these new modes of research. He shares a few highlights: finding and accessing congressional records for a large-scale text analysis project, reviewing vendor text mining products, connecting with faculty to identify new corpora acquisitions, collaborating on text analysis documentation projects, and defining the legal boundaries around scraping various online text sources.

How many research guides go neglected because we can’t keep up with all the stellar content we create for our patrons? As digital content producers, librarians are always looking for new ways to repurpose content for different audiences while streamlining content management. Fortunately, with the ongoing development of content management tools like Springshare LibGuides 2.0, the dream approaches reality. Presenters offer simple strategies (including naming, description, and chunking) for content creation and management that maximize opportunities for repurposing content across delivery platforms while keeping maintenance to a minimum. While this session focuses on LibGuides and LibAnswers, the content creation techniques discussed are applicable to any content management system that supports dynamic content mapping and/or external widget creation.

According to Jenny McKenszie, “The Customer is why we are here. If we take good care of them, they will give us a reason to come back. Join a resort librarian and a director of customer experience for highlights of stellar customer service. From the Waffle House to Walgreens, examine why some delight while others fail. Explore tactics for supporting a strong service culture that include hiring passionate people, supporting deviant thinking, eliminating service barriers, secret shopping (yes, secret shopping), and the power of the little word “yes.”

Our speaker, a veteran strategic creative/serial entrepreneur and community mobilizer, helps individuals and organizations experiment with new ways of working and being in the workplace. She is an expert at aligning talents and objects as a best practice to facilitate building high performance teams. Get tips and techniques to foster and engage teams of staff, community members and partners to ensure positive user experience for both team and community members.

As library offerings go digital, members and non-members increasingly rely on the library website for information and access. How do we encourage these digital visitors to walk through our physical doors? Gordner applies frameworks from digital advertising, including the conversion funnel and the customer journey map, to turn web traffic into foot traffic. Benzing discusses ethnographic study, an approach often used in anthropology to examine and describe various communities. It can be useful in library user studies for gaining a more cohesive understanding of user communities. Hear about a study of student users and how their results are being used to plan and drive future renovations of the physical space. Ethnographic studies can have practical impact on your decisions about library resources physical and virtual.

Libraries everywhere are re-envisioning themselves as places, spaces, and services for 21st-century users. Focusing on the user has become central to creating and improving library services, spaces, collections, instruction, and programming. Hear three ways this is happening. MIIS created a new position dedicated to learning about and responding to our users. Hear how a campus course became an opportunity for the new user experience librarian to work alongside a core user group: students. Team Library, working with the librarian, transformed and revitalized the library’s downstairs space using design thinking. PLS, located in Oklahoma, had a dream of delivering its innovative in-person library experience to the library cardholder’s mobile device. Hear about their experience with an app developed by its integrated library system vendor and how they moved to an internally designed app debuted in the Android and iOS app stores called Pioneer Library System Connect, but affectionately nicknamed “The One App to Rule Them All.” Infographics continue to be go to tools to help professionals break down content and link vocabulary content and additional information. Marketing companies are already using infographics more and more to help reveal data and get the buyer to connect more with the content. Get tips to become a successful infographic innovator, by understanding the scaffolding necessary to build a successful infographic as well as some cool online tools such as Canva, Google Drawing, Easel.ly, and many more!

This double session looks at the new and exciting roles that librarians in four different organizations are carving out and impacting. In order to stay relevant, to impact employee performance, and, most importantly, to be seen as a positive contributor to the bottom line, enterprise libraries continue to evolve, building upon past successes and learning from current challenges. Transformation is driven by the business need and how successfully libraries anticipate or respond to those needs. Everything from the services offered to the skills for which the library hires directly tie back to helping employees make better business decisions. Powell discusses the expanding role of the embedded information professional in knowledge management. She talks about the archive, which is tasked with making internal information easier to store, discover, and retrieve. Strategies for integrating disparate content, including traditional library materials (e.g., books, technical reports), intellectual property assets (designs, process documentation), controlled documents (specifications, drawings), and manufacturing and product data into the library catalog are addressed along with the challenges of managing physical and digital assets with differing security/access requirements, innovative uses for the thesaurus functionality of integrated library systems, and more about how the library or archive can expand to add value to their organization’s knowledge management strategies. The third presentation focuses on specialized science and technology institutions, specifically their information needs for research and development in the form of both internal and external knowledge. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) spaceflight projects consistently build on work that has already been done, using unique heritage and legacy records as a backbone for new projects and development. Through leveraging the roles of the combined NASA JPL Library, Archive, and Records Management section (LARS), it is able to provide comprehensive research deliverables that capture both internally-generated reports and externally published articles to better inform spacecraft and mission development. This unique approach to embedded librarianship allows for on-demand reference services that utilize the full capacity of the knowledge resources that LARS offers. By using a combination of in-person interfacing with customers and digital collaboration among librarians in various roles, they are able to answer reference questions rapidly and provide an in-depth deliverable that spans both externally published work as well as internally generated data and reports.

Understanding the ever-changing environment within which your community or organization exists is critical to setting the direction for your library and it’s staff. Get insights and ideas on how to be aware of the big picture in your environment from this panel!

Atlassian JIRA is a collaborative issue and project tracking tool, allowing you to track any unit of work. This enables a surprising flexibility in task management. Heavily used in the software world, JIRA can also track things such as a remodeling project, sorting and reorganization of a collection, and student work efforts, and is a great tool for getting things done. This session shares how the presenter set up a JIRA instance and a simple webpage to take over a complicated and cumbersome in-person and email review process. The entire system was streamlined, maximizing information sharing while minimizing effort, and is now being adopted by partners outside the project.

In 2012, The MITRE Corp. developed an organizational initiative to optimize its ability to deliver on the unique value of federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs). With a goal of advancing customer engagement, it needed to create a baseline understanding of client business environments and to adopt a process to build and maintain the information picture or “blueprint.” The Environmental Scanning Service was created—a process allowing staff to collect information themselves and/or work with one of the department’s information analysts embedded across MITRE. The information analysts delivered research and developed SharePoint sites to organize, store and share documents. Information Services is taking environmental scanning a step further by pushing content to staff at just the right time, when they need it to make a decision. They focus on “triggering” events, evaluating alerting mechanisms needed to deliver information, and timing of delivery. Get tips to use in your organization for environmental scanning and anticipatory delivery of information.

Privacy is an even bigger issue than it has been in the past, and info pros need to empower themselves before they can assist their customers with knowledge, awareness, and understanding of privacy issues. Hear from one of our popular industry leaders and empower yourself!

Do you know what an 0day is? Would you know if you had been “pwned”? This nontechnical approach to learning about information security provides a basic understanding of the major vocabulary, resources, and major vendor players in the rapidly expanding cybersecurity industry. Get a better understanding of encryption and how to protect your own valuable data as well as how to better communicate with IT to help protect your organization against a cyber attack. Get comfortable with information security for both personal and professional use from our knowledgeable practitioners.

Markman shares the results of an independent cybersecurity risk management audit for a public library system. He stresses that while cybersecurity must include raising public knowledge in regard to issues and resources, and libraries are indeed the perfect place to disseminate this knowledge, librarians are also in a unique position as the gatekeepers of information services provided to the public. Therefore, he believes libraries should conduct internal audits to ensure our content partners and IT vendors take cybersecurity as seriously as we do. One way to do this is through periodic reviews of existing vendor relationships and their policies. He introduces a simple way to measure vender cybersecurity, a grading system librarians can adopt or modify to help take their first step toward securing libraries and library patrons.

This double session begins with a lawyer who talks about how intellectual property law continues to struggle to adapt to the changing norms of a digital world. As information service providers and content gatekeepers, librarians are especially sensitive to this shifting legal landscape, and McElwain explores basic tenets of copyright law, including authorship, infringement, fair use, and contributory liability, as well as recent legal developments relevant to information professionals such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Stored Communications Act, and the Communications Decency Act. Weiss presents easy-to-digest info about dealing with rights and permissions for digital and online documents, lectures, and audio/video presentations; course management systems; YouTube; and even class recordings. Marvin addresses some case studies: Your new content on the institutional repository has launched. To make your yearbooks and course catalogs more easily accessible, the details and images were placed online. Students were asked to use a free website to post their art assignments using ArtStor. The student German Club posted images it found on the internet of popular places in Germany. Innocent intent or not, these are examples of when copyright was an afterthought. Faculty who are authors ask to have their items removed from the IR because the publisher disallows this. A student is upset that not only is her current address available in the yearbook, other companies are also offering access to this information for a fee. ArtStor contacted the institution’s copyright compliance officer to demand content be removed. The German Club gets a post from an attorney to pay $250 immediately. Get tips on how to avoid these kind of copyright challenges!

What consumer and public trends can school libraries capitalize on to provide innovative or student-friendly services? Inspired by the Center for the Future of Libraries, Carolyn will explore trends like fast casual dining that can impact library services, design, or policies.   

Imagination, creativity, flexibility, and the ability to play well with others are important qualities for any individual to have. Why are they more important than ever, and how can they be fostered and/or improved? How is imagination different from creativity? What roles do play, tinkering, and making have in the development of imagination and creativity, and where does failure fit in? How can school libraries work with other staff to spark more inquiry and engaged learning in their communities?

Search results have evolved from a portal to a destination. This is especially true for students, who are now entering school with a command of Google, even if they don’t know how to use a mouse. Deirdre and Christi talk about user research findings on the topic of search results, including why students are drawn to Google and Wikipedia, how school libraries can use this to their advantage, and how those habits represent a technological and sometimes generational divide.

How do you craft the story of student achievement in your school library? Or is your school library perceived as a value in a bygone era? We discuss how content marketing strategies, technology tools, and the power of a story can connect school libraries with students, staff, and the community. Come away with the tools to create and launch your library story/marketing campaign.

What does the school library of the future look like? Is it a stark, sterile space with no books? Is it filled with 3D printers and other digital technologies? Does it only exist virtually on a screen? Historically, library futurists, encouraged by a media fascinated with the death of print, have often been very wrong. At the Seven Hills School, a recent transition provided an opportunity to reassess the library program and make major changes that look to the future while honoring the important roles libraries have traditionally played. With these changes, the library is transitioning into a vibrant community hub for its stakeholders. Roquet discusses the successes and challenges the library has faced along the way and shares strategies for making high-impact changes with limited time and money.

Lighthearted and entertaining, but also educational and insightful, this evening is an overview of what was and what was envisioned 20 years ago contrasted with the realities of 2016. It looks at the inaugural 1997 Internet Librarian program topics, speakers, and exhibitors and features comments from original participants; discusses topics and themes that have endured; remembers products and services that no longer exist; and much more! It touches on what customers were exploring and how that contrasts with today, how we are doing business differently today, and what this tells us today and for the future. Join us for a wonderful evening and also crowd source your photos and memories from Internet Librarian events during the past 20 years.