Tuesday, October 24, 2017

As a former journalist, our speaker has a unique perspective on the future of libraries and the challenges of digital transformation. Hear his insights and ideas as well as some of the innovative and creative experiments in and with libraries currently underway in California.

 

A successful makerspace demands a unique service model, and the librarian-at-the-desk ain’t it. Whether you’re just pitching your makerspace plan today or you’ve been making for years, this talk challenges you to remix your preconceived notions of service to develop a fast casual restaurant model. How do you create a welcoming environment where everyone can comfortably fail, succeed, and learn? How do you empower makers while preserving equipment (and your budget)? How do you play to a variety of staff strengths in a fast-moving environment? Hit the sweet spot between the full dining experience and a self-serve buffet with librarians on their feet, stoking the oven along with patrons, guiding them through the entire meal from scratch to dining room. Speakers share the secrets of Winnetka-Northfield Public Library District’s Studio, a thriving makerspace serving everything from classic art to high-tech experiences in a collaborative, creative environment.

Hold onto your seat as our leading-edge tech guru (yes, our Games & Gadget Guy) speeds through a wide range of awesome maker tech for your innovative library space. Don’t try to take notes, as his slides are shared so you can share with your colleagues too! From robots to circuits to coding, he covers it all.

How can a technology lab provide a space for creativity and collaboration within your community? Librarians tell the story of the Carlsbad City Library Exploration HUB from concept to reality, describing challenges, successes, and ROI. During a 2015–16 renovation, a staff area was repurposed into patron space, where patrons explore new technology, take classes, and pursue their own creative endeavors. Hear about hardware, software, network capabilities, funding sources, staffing models, class schedules, staff training, and volunteer recruitment. Averaging 45 classes per month taught by librarians, library technicians, and volunteers, they cover Arduino, 3D design, photo editing, and paper/vinyl crafting. Kopecky discusses the journey to create a regular makerspace for a 2-year college. From the ground up, they blazed a trail, finding literature on makerspaces in schools mainly focused on public libraries and some 4-year academic libraries, but little information available for their specific type of school. With help from a variety of sources, and with boundless enthusiasm, they began a pop-up makerspace in the library. A new grant has allowed them to engage with various community stakeholders and learn more about the maker community, both inside and outside of California. Get tips and tricks on how to create your own library technology space. Our last speakers talk about how to maximum your budget for STEAM programs with fun and innovative activities. From simple to more in-depth experiments, gain some hands-on experience by using your everyday skills to complete a STEAM challenge. Get some practical advice to take the fear out of hosting a science-based library program—without the science background. Come ready to ask all your STEAM-related questions.

Wen showcases the library’s interactive map which was created to better serve the patrons after the library’s move to a new site. She describes creating the map and the technology tools used. Rassibi discusses the approaches to ensure the discovery and use of the library’s digital learning objects including a series of usability studies conducted to determine how best to reorganize the library tutorials web page. Hear the lessons learned regarding student recruitment methods, analyzing the results, and tools used to recruit students, conduct studies, and communicate results to interested stakeholders.

How do we design for changing technologies and flexible smart spaces? How do we incorporate new gadgets, apps and technologies to engage our communities? Get some insights and ideas for planning for the future for successful user library experiences.

Remember when you were in school and asked a question, and the teacher said, “Look it up”? Now, thanks to the overwhelming availability of online research resources—free and premium— that is what your customers are doing: looking things up themselves. So how do librarians remain vital in this self-service world? This presentation explores the ways in which 21st-century librarians must reinvent themselves, from providing quick, transactional answers to developing deep, ongoing partnerships with their customers. As trusted consultants, librarians combine research and relationship-building expertise to shape and develop their customers’ projects from inception to completion, and do not simply react to requests for specific information. Using the “relationship pyramid” as a model, the presentation will use case studies to illustrate how corporate librarians can remain essential to their organizations by developing nontraditional librarian skills—and an entirely new mindset for their work.

Effectively communicating the true return on investment for information services means more than just counting hours saved or searches conducted. In order to convey the true ROI of your information center, you have to understand what matters most to the people who matter the most. Bates provides new approaches for identifying WHY you are doing what you do and what impact that has on your organization’s most important goals.

This session focuses on two examples of libraries partnering to make an impact on different communities. Kendall draws on 15 years of experience of transferring medical library knowledge and practices to Ethiopia. The volunteer medical staff (including doctors and nurses), in addition to their job responsibilities, provide a thorough knowledge of the electronic resources available to the library and all medical students from the more than 14,000 full-text electronic journals and 20,000-plus ebooks available to Ethiopia from HINARI, the World Health Organization’s electronic library. This inspiring story of partners working with and teaching medical and allied health students is definitely improving the medical situation in Ethiopia. Kendall uses this as an example of how we are all connected in our world and should be doing more for developing countries in their quest to improve their library and other services. Our second speaker discusses a collaborative project to improve tools, curation, and content stewardship for the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), a globally accessible full-text database of biodiversity literature. Funded by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a cohort of National Digital Stewardship Residents (NDSR), all graduates of LIS or related master’s programs, are placed at five U.S. institutions for mentorship as well as a specific project designed to improve the functionality of BHL. Hear about the development of a best practices guidelines document for digital libraries incorporating transcriptions, image searching, collection analysis techniques and better connections to museums, archives and other relevant databases.

Two MITRE information analysts discuss the use of online and social media analysis tools to generate situation awareness for deliverables provided to government customers. Working within a team of analysts, scientists, developers, and modelers, the information analysts use commercially available tools (both free and for-fee) to contribute to the generation of various case studies which act as a proof-of-concept to demonstrate how these technologies can provide support to government missions. To demonstrate this work, presenters describe their use of an industry tool, generation of search queries in the tool, and analysis of query results using the tool’s various analytic and visualization capabilities, including geolocation of social media messages, trending topics, and user demographics. They talk about the value and limitations of online and social media tools and data as well as other tools used, including advanced research analytic capabilities under development at MITRE.

Pichman discusses the power of Slack, a communication app with real-time messaging, archiving, and search for modern teams, which leads to collaboration, organization, and, most importantly, innovation. Slack is almost a replacement for email that organizes and categorizes information based on channels, with a ton of integrations to make your life easier and automate many tasks. Reamy discusses how AI and deep learning are hot topics these days and how most of the advances have to do with image and pattern recognition. He shares how taxonomies deal with much messier things—words and their multiple meanings. While taxonomies are relatively formal and static, AI thrives on dynamic and ever-changing structure. Reamy looks at some surprising ways that organizations are learning to take advantage of the strengths of each: Taxonomies can add new types and levels of structure to AI analysis of words and documents; AI can be used to help build taxonomies. The new AI techniques are essentially text mining on steroids. Get lots of examples and ideas combining the two fields of AI and taxonomy.

This fast-paced double session focuses on five different digitization stories. One of the largest online photograph collections in the world is available through The Revs Institute, the premier destination to study and explore one of the most comprehensive archives of automotive history ever preserved for scholars and connoisseurs. Within the Institute resides both a museum and a library, including vintage automobiles and an ever-expanding catalog of rare books, photographs, and archival collections. These diverse collections uniquely explore the evolution of automobile design and the industry’s influence on modern culture. Hear how Revs digitizes and makes available more than 6,000 images per month (460,000 currently available with 600,000 more to go). The digitization team cleans and processes every negative and slide, creates finding aids, and adds metadata for each individual image. Volunteer support at all stages as well as crowd-sourcing edits and additions to the metadata from researchers and automotive enthusiasts from around the world adds to the project. Hulser describes two digitization projects. One is focused on an archive collection of glass and lantern slides of the La Brea Tar Pits created in the early 1900s made more accessible for research, marketing, and communications purposes. These items are now stored in a KE-EMu specimen management system, indexed and linked to an EOS online library catalog, and accessible for reproduction and rights management in a digital asset management system. The other project is digitization of an entire run of the NHMLAC peer-reviewed journal Contributions in Science (CiS) in collaboration with the Smithsonian Libraries to enable content discovery at the article level in the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Altmetrics analytic tools were then able to be applied to provide an understanding of online attention to research articles beyond traditional bibliometrics of citation counting. Barrilleaux discusses LOUIS’ Affordable Learning LOUISiana, which is aligned with the national affordability program for higher education. Partnering with local, statewide, and national partners to lower textbooks costs for Louisiana higher-education students. The initiative focuses on the course adoption of open textbooks and open educational resources (OERs), the finding of resources using fellows to match available open textbooks and OERs from existing repositories —Open Textbook Library, OER Commons, and MERLOT—with Louisiana’s common course catalog, and the supporting technology. Hear more about the Find Textbooks portal where faculty can search for their courses and see a linked list of available open textbooks and OERs available for adoption, or recommend one. Boulie presents a case study in success begetting success and discusses internal marketing strategies and techniques to build momentum for increased interest in digitization and digital collections. Success in digitization resulted in applying the workflows, storage strategies, file naming conventions, and best practices to other museum digital outputs and also led to increased donor interest in supporting future digitization efforts. Definitely a magic sauce recipe for success!

Libraries make great investments in creating collections for the benefit of their communities. In order to get the most out of these investments, libraries also need to have effective strategies for discovery and access. Libraries can implement discovery systems to enable the patrons who visit their web sites to search and gain access to materials. But it is also important to find ways to make their collections easily found in other contexts, such as through Google searches or course pages in learning management systems. Breeding reviews the current state of discovery products and the technologies and services able to make library collections more widely discoverable beyond the library-provided interfaces.

Libraries in all verticals are facing budget cuts. Hear from the author of the definitive book on how to more effectively negotiate econtent licenses with vendors about how to achieve better deals with vendors, resulting in more money for the library. Then get a case study that began with a desire of all Ontario hospitals (155) to participate in licensing of the first provincially (ministry of health) funded medical library resource. Hear the ups and downs of the process, including the agreement, support by the publisher/vendor, the quest for key players in the province to support the proposal, and, finally, to have this license signed and implemented.

Sketchy algorithms. Incomplete and inaccurate data. Fake news. Many found the existence of these phenomena as surprising as Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. But was it surprising to librarians? Not so much. We know the charlatans are out there, but our expertise has always been in discovering and curating high-quality data and information from well-regarded sources and in understanding the results that we present in research projects. So how can we leverage the focus on these concerns in order to showcase our expert information and data evaluation, discovery, application, and analysis skills? This session takes a look at what has gone wrong in recent months when Big Data and fake news were used to make faulty predictions and decisions. Did the poor prognostications signal the death of Big Data? Not quite, and they just might herald a rebirth, led by the professionals most skilled at using it (us!). You will leave this session with an action plan for analyzing the integrity and quality of both data and news, and concrete marketing tips to position yourself in a critical role in making sure that your organization gets it right.

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!

When the U.S. Federal Communications Commission scrapped plans to introduce safeguards preventing Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from selling individual web browsing history, journalists went into high gear with advice and suggestions for protecting search privacy and encrypting online activity. Do we really need to purchase Virtual Privacy Networks (VPNs) and use Tor? Affelt talks about the pros and cons of the most-mentioned protective safeguards and shares more cost-effective workarounds and stealth search strategies. Newman shares tips from her book.

Pichman walks through the tools that help provide anonymity and some ways to help mitigate the ease of being tracked. He goes beyond private VPNs and Tor Browsing to provide other tips and tricks. He gives an overview of some of the common devices, either hardware- or software-based, that are used by the Dark Side, and some easy-to-use defenses that you and your users can employ to protect yourselves from these attack vectors. Think of it as a Defense Against the Dark Arts class!

Cervone discusses Blockchain, a permanent record of transactions that’s transparent to all its users, how it is currently being used in many different ways, and how it might apply to library issues such as copyright and intellectual property.

Watching the world and our communities in hyper-speed through hurricanes, earthquakes and other local emergencies and events, has make our information overload even more hard to handle.  Get some insights, ideas, and thoughts for updating your library digital services and practices for 2018 from one of our resident industry and trends watchers.

Process, findings and advice from a Researcher on EBSCO's User Research team who has spent the last year focusing on how students interact with search results.

How many times do educators watch compliant, on-task students but worry if they are personally engaged? Students “deliver the deliverables” but skim over critical opportunities for deep thinking. Research shows that actively involved students are not just on-task, but continuously forming cognitive and emotional connections to their learning. Key findings at the intersection of education, psychology, and neuroscience can inform practical ways to boost student metacognition and growth mindset “in the learning moment.” Watch how to scaffold feedback loops and reflective questioning alongside your favorite extended assignment, research project, or portfolio review process using new technology paradigms to support and document student engagement.

There are a number of ways to describe the conditions for learning that support working, learning, and contributing as a citizen in a world in perpetual beta. Educators have described this landscape as “21st century,” “next-generation,” and most recently “future ready.” In this session, we discuss five provocative shifts in library practice that can establish a new reality for what “library” means and how it serves a school community. Our goal is to push on the boundaries of the design of libraries. Together, we consider the transformative programmatic directions that K–12 libraries can take to create a remarkable experience for students, an experience that prepares them to be agile and participatory learners and citizens.

We are bombarded by news media in multiple formats—print, broadcast, internet, and social. The volume, velocity, and variety of information is growing exponentially. New literacy skills are essential to distinguish between fact and opinion in this ocean of data. How do you tell if a news story is true or false? If adults have trouble deciphering what is true and what is not, then how do our students fare? Moore shares teaching strategies she uses with her digital literacy class on critical-thinking skills for analyzing and judging the reliability of news and information, differentiating among facts, opinions and assertions in the media we consume, create and distribute.

Our eagle-eyed ed-tech and information industry watcher talks about how to find good apps and shares a number of apps that media specialists and other educators will want to check out. He also shares the top sites and tools that info pros and searchers will want to use. Come and benefit from his vast knowledge and gather tips and tools to share with others.

Are libraries in a death match with other cultural or community institutions? With Amazon? With robots? Are apps or the browser the way of the future? Check out these fast and furious debates by experienced librarians, IT pros, thought leaders, and practitioners! Stimulate your thinking and have fun too with our popular ring leader!