8:45 AM
Wednesday - Keynote
Length: 1 Hour
Description: Our speaker is a veteran of the laser, digital fabrication and 3D printing industries and discusses her new collar job skills research, lifelong learning research, and her new book, People of the New Collar Workforce: Augmented Reality Brings Human/Machine Stories to Life, which tells the stories of new collar workers in everything from 3D printing to laser machining. Boisvert also discusses the skills needed to operate in new industries such as AI, 3D printing, and robotics and how libraries can help in that regard! After selling her laser machine tool company, Boisvert took up research residence at a lab at MIT, where she began to interact with other researchers and expand her interest in the processes and learning necessary to use digital fabrication and other tools. Boisvert was most interested in alternative education methods to expand the skills gap for new disruptive industries. As the manufacturing and tech author says, as tech expands, many skills that modern workers have and were hired for will no longer be needed in the future. She explains how new technologies such as 3D printing are evolving rapidly and cites examples of how new technologies will not have the benefit of calling on experienced veterans of the industry for help with machines and tech when problems arise because the technologies are evolving so quickly that everyone is new to them. As a result, these new technicians will have to be adaptable and have the ability to troubleshoot in the moment. They’ll need to be problem-solvers in order to stay afloat in an ever-changing technology space. She notes that many employers are hiring workers with no college degree to fill these new roles. Join us and hear how your library can have a strong future in your community. Whether you represent a school, college, academic institution, industry, or public library, there is role for you in futurizing your community!
10:30 AM
Digital Libraries & Branches
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Nick Tanzi, Assistant Director, South Huntington Public Library
David Lee King, Digital Services Director, Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library
Sharon Day, Director, Branch Services & Collections, Edmonton Public Library
Speaker TBD, Academic Library
Description: In the past year, many libraries had well-developed digital branches, while others did not. Hear from our speakers how (or if) they were ready to deal with an influx of users during our health crisis.
Digital Branch continues with Session A202, 11:30-12:15.
Managing Content
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Michael LaMagna, Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator; Professor of Library Services, Delaware County Community College
Erica Danowitz, Reference Librarian/Professor, Delaware County Community College
Andrea Rodgers, Associate Professor, Delaware County Community College
Description: Academic library collections now include a significant number of ebooks to support students enrolled in both on-campus and online courses. Delaware County Community College has invested in developing a large-scale ebook collection to support both sets of students across a number of campus locations in two counties. Students, faculty, and staff had no access to a physical book collection during the second-half of the Spring 2020 semester due to COVID-19. During this period, library services actively promoted electronic resources, including its ebook collection, to support all courses online. This presentation examines ebook usage data from the same period during the previous academic year and ebook usage data from the period when the college moved all classes and library services entirely online. This information will inform how libraries manage ebook collections and the relevance of this format for academic libraries moving forward.
Enterprise Practices & Insights
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Craig Wingrove, Director, Global Information Procurement, Boston Consulting Group (BCG)
Janet Hartmann, Product Manager, Research Center, Boston Consulting Group (BCG)
Description: BCG continues pushing self-service research to organizational customers into the future with a help bot, Ask Sandy on Research Center, their self-service research portal. Learn from their journey: from ideation to deployment, and all the fun in between. Find out how they balanced optimizing bot usefulness with minimizing potential user frustration, along with the technologies they used to succeed. Wingrove shares how the bot is doing 6 months after deployment and how users have reacted.
Extended Reality (ER) & Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Chad Mairn, Professor & Librarian, St. Petersburg College
Description: Extended Reality (XR) includes AI and VR (augmented and virtual reality), and these technologies are storming every industry. Libraries are taking advantage of the wave in a big way. Hear the latest about the technology and what’s on the horizon. Learn about the types of programs being offered in libraries and be inspired by our innovative and imaginative speaker.
Internet@Schools
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Tobi Fineberg, High School Librarian, The Dalton School
Description: Learn about how a yearlong science research project culminated with podcast interviews with scientists. Students learned to synthesize and expand their research while becoming proficient with GarageBand for editing, transcription tools (Sonix, Google) to provide accessible text transcripts, and Photoshop to create their podcast logos. Learn how to replicate similar projects and what tweaks make it more successful.
11:30 AM
Digital Libraries & Branches
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Nick Tanzi, Assistant Director, South Huntington Public Library
David Lee King, Digital Services Director, Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library
Sharon Day, Director, Branch Services & Collections, Edmonton Public Library
Speaker TBD, Academic Library
Description: In the past year, many libraries had well-developed digital branches, while others did not. Hear from our speakers how (or if) they were ready to deal with an influx of users during our health crisis.
Managing Content
Length: 45 Minutes
Enterprise Practices & Insights
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: Topic mining, modeling, and extraction are improving rapidly with technologies such as text analytics, machine learning and deep learning. Combining these powerful tools with intelligent virtual assistants (aka conversational agents) have the potential for augmenting researchers by automating some of the more routine aspects of research, including Information gathering, filtering, and mining. Researchers can then focus on identifying topics for research, deriving and presenting insights. Our speaker provides a framework for virtual research assistants and explores some ideas for prototyping them.
Extended Reality (ER) & Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: During the last 3 years, California and Nevada have launched statewide initiatives to integrate extended reality (XR) systems and programming into libraries. Our speakers discuss XR programming use in libraries and the best practices developed in each state as libraries installed XR systems. They cover the XR setup, installation, and staff training with examples and assessment of what worked and what didn't work. They share the process of how libraries introduced AR and VR to patrons through demonstrations, and community events and made XR an integral programming component as a digital "collection." They look to the future of new devices and applications with examples of wireless VR and AR headsets and share how to have an adaptable system in place for an emerging field where standards are just beginning to emerge.
Internet@Schools
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Carolyn Foote, Library Consultant, Free Range Librarian
Description: How did school librarians respond to urgent remote learning needs in the recent health crisis? Learn some of the roles librarians played to help their faculties and K-12 students with adapting to teaching and learning online.
1:30 PM
Digital Libraries & Branches
Length: 1 Hour
Description: What did we learn in the past 6-plus months? Where did our libraries and communities fail? How can we improve our services and readiness now and into the future? Our panel shares their past failures, plans, and actions for improving their services, as well as their recent community experiences.
Managing Content
Length: 1 Hour
Description: Communities of all types are discovering the value of their significant history for current and future endeavors. By identifying, organizing, and broadening awareness of historical artifacts using technological tools, public and private communities are futurizing their organizations. Hear how a combination of physical and digital archives represent the founding of the small City of West Hollywood, home of the famous Sunset Strip. Learn about another small but vibrant nonprofit religious community that is using their organization’s archive to expand awareness of their mission, including a controversial period when the Catholic Church was in a time of great transition.
Enterprise Practices & Insights
Length: 1 Hour
Description: Just as early online services didn’t just improve on the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature but revolutionized how information is accessed, so librarians and info pros can look at artificial intelligence from a different point of view and identify opportunities to lead the AI discussion within their organizations. Hear from an experienced and future-focused info pro about strategic approaches to this transformative technology and how info pros can leverage their skills and thrive in this new information environment.
Extended Reality (ER) & Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Length: 1 Hour
Description: As you move your institution forward, balancing robots and humans in the workplace; navigating union, funding, and political environments; and building more inclusive points of connection across and within evolving communities, do you feel like you are leading in a minefield? If you do and you are, this session is for you! Come learn and exchange pragmatic pro tips with library leaders.
Internet@Schools
Length: 1 Hour
Speaker(s):
Ferdi Serim, Digital Learning Innovator, Community Learning Network
Description: Our pioneer of the Internet for learning, discusses helping communities bridge classroom and career by using evidence to evaluate and improve work-based learning opportunities. Focused on development of “New Collar Workforce” skills, this evidence is used to strengthen employer/educator engagement, helping every student be “ready for what’s next”. The aim is for students to become more effective by incorporating the power of digital learning communities focused on talent development. Get lots of insights and ideas from this inspiring speaker!
3:15 PM
Digital Libraries & Branches
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: During the recent health crisis, many publishers, archives, museums, zoos, authors, musicians, theaters and others created or provided access to new and exciting content, online events, and more. How do we incorporate these into our digital branches? How do we bring awareness of our new channels for content and learning to our communities? In addition, many publishers responded to the health crisis by removing paywalls and making their content free. At some point, that may change, and library patrons who became accustomed to free content may be asked to pay, as will libraries. How can we work with the publishers to find a positive solution? There have also been new initiatives to digitize print materials, memorabilia, grey literature, and archival information. How do we keep up with these and connect them to our communities? Our panel of speakers tackle these questions promising a lively discussion!
Managing Content
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: Walden University recently launched an internal activity reporting instrument to collect and highlight the accomplishments of our faculty. This presented an opportunity to harvest faculty research publication data for inclusion in the university’s open access institutional repository. With very limited staff capacity to manage this new work, it was critical to develop an efficient, sustainable workflow for conducting faculty outreach, including gathering copyright info and manuscript files, data processing, and uploading into our repository. Speakers discuss efforts to design a semi-automated process—using Excel macros to parse data and pre-filled web forms for faculty email outreach—that has been successful, but not without its challenges. Educating faculty about open access, copyright agreements, and manuscript versions is also baked into the workflow. Ultimately, the library has established another positive connection with faculty by ensuring their scholarly work is available open access to a wider audience. This framework can be applied to other projects and populations, and attendees leave with an adaptable workflow to implement similar projects at their own institution.
Enterprise Practices & Insights
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Paul de Barros, Research Librarian, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco
Description: When it comes to being loved, libraries are right up there with kittens and rainbows. But it’s only our value—when decision makers understand it—that keeps us alive. Value turns “love” into commitment. How can corporate libraries demonstrate their value all the way up the line, from skeptical unit heads to executives poised with red pens to keep the organization lean? Is it marketing? Is it through testimonials and word-of-mouth? Is it through nurturing enterprise-wise relationships? Dogged communication even when the parent unit may seem less than interested? Finding ingenious ways to showcase projects and successes to leadership? Yes. Explore ways that one special library has overcome, and at times continues to wrestle with, these issues and questions.
Extended Reality (ER) & Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Michelle Zaffino, Founder & Chief Digital Librarian, MyLibrarian / In the Stacks
Fabio Montella, Assistant Professor, Library Services, Suffolk County Community College (SCCC)
Description: Zaffino shares how machine learning/AI technology is being used to develop the Librarian Brain dataset that powers a new product, MyLibrarian, a data-driven book recommendation engine. Attendees will have the opportunity to beta test this modern way to browse for books. This ML/AI book discovery product uses big data and expert librarian brains to disrupt a $40B industry. In the Stacks (a book discovery tool that uses expert data to select stories, books, ebooks, audio, TV and film) is building the MyLibrarian app for book lovers, a tool that leverages the expertise of book-reviewing librarians, and brings that skill out of the library, to users online. Montella discusses how in the spring of 2018, SCCC began piloting a virtual reality lab within its library. While the process of building and implementing the lab proved to be an arduous task at times, it eventually provided the college community with a valuable resource for learning. Hear about the aspects of the VR lab that brought it to fruition (conceptualization, finances, logistics, etc.) as well as the envisioned outcomes and future trajectory. There are lots of challenges and questions that need to be addressed when thinking about bringing virtual reality (VR) equipment into your library. Get some answers here!
Internet@Schools
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Wendy Stephens, School Library Program Chair, Jacksonville State University
Description: From virtual field trips offered by a range of agencies and institutions to teacher-led Google expeditions and greenscreen scene-shifting, technology is enabling new, location-independent content and responsive personalized active learning. This talk involves exploring Google Translate and Google Lens and using MergeCubes and QuiverVision for augmenting reality as well as processes for creating 3D experiences.
4:15 PM
Digital Libraries & Branches
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Anh Hoang, Library Director, University of Economics (UEH), Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Description: University libraries are being driven by the digital transformation movement, and in recent years, discussions have included the “smart library.” As part of this movement, university libraries have begun to embrace innovative methods that create multidimensional collaborations. No longer just a face-to-face interaction between patrons, librarians, and third parties, libraries now include machine-to-machine communication and connection. At one smart library (UEH), Internet of Things (IoT) air quality, humidity, luminosity, temperature, and noise detector sensors have been combined into a single-point device that delivers data back to the library monitoring and managing system in real time. The system automatically adjusts the “smart” devices to provide green and energy-saving spaces for library users. Its resources are available in everyone’s hands via a mobile app with a package of systems, a touchscreen application that integrates with a bundle of four library software systems incorporated into user services to provide hyper-personalized and timely support. The library’s operational efficiency is extended as staffing intervention is reduced. Librarians’ skill sets are changing, requiring collaboration with industrial partners. Hear about the process of building a smart library conceptually, how smart devices are actually “smart” in the library space, finding suitable technological stakeholders, and challenges of a brand-new smart library. This case study illustrates how to innovate libraries that are short on staff and have limited budgets.
Managing Content
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: This talk explores strategies/methodologies for academic libraries to extend their traditional support services to faculty and students beyond the spectrum of scholarly research. Professional colleges have extended their curriculum to include new programs in data analytics, both from a theoretical and a practical perspective, often involving the use of large datasets and commercial software such as SAS, SPSS, JMP, Python, and Tableau. Most university libraries are unprepared to support such efforts. Speakers share resource development and a practical road map to follow to enable librarians to provide support in terms of research, information, and content for these academic programs. He describes the journey of a national university in Southern California as an example of the development of a viable road map for the transition of library support to include data analytic programs.
Enterprise Practices & Insights
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Kathleen Monti, IT Librarian, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC)
Description: In today’s quickly changing world, it is nearly impossible to separate the library from IT professionals who support the broader institution. Job boards are often teaming with listings for positions like “IT Librarian” or “Technology Librarian.” Regardless of library type, librarians must develop relationships and a common language with the broader IT departments administering the network, gateways, and security profile of the larger institution. Without a common language, librarians and IT professionals lose valuable time—and often money—identifying and fixing issues that could have been avoided. Monti examines the current state of librarians’ collaboration with IT professionals and ways they can ensure continued success and uninterrupted services to their patrons.
Extended Reality (ER) & Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Fabio Montella, Assistant Professor, Library Services, Suffolk County Community College (SCCC)
Description: In spring of 2018, SCCC began piloting a virtual reality (VR) lab within its library. While the process of building and implementing the lab proved to be an arduous task at times, it eventually provided the college community with a valuable resource for learning. Hear about the aspects of the VR lab that brought it to fruition (conceptualization, finances, logistics, etc.) as well as the envisioned outcomes and future trajectory. There are lots of challenges and questions that need to be addressed when thinking about bringing VR equipment into your library. Get some answers here!
Internet@Schools
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Carrie Consalvi, Librarian & Open Educational Resources Initiative Liaison, Mt. San Jacinto Community College
Description: A 2019 survey showed only 12% of the instructional faculty were using Open Educational Resources (OER). However, high interest in making the shift toward affordable textbooks was evident, especially with institutional focus on equity. The main barriers to transitioning were described as a lack of professional development, the need for support from knowledgeable OER leaders, and the call for monetary incentive.
Consalvi shares her experience with how she responded to the faculty concerns in shifting to OER focusing on the development of a stipend grant for the faculty, which promoted an equity commitment while also providing professional development as well as other strategies—like forming an OER task force with faculty or commandeering the all-faculty mandatory meeting for a workshop. She aims to encourage and equip others who are encountering faculty resistance while embarking on the important shift toward OER.
7:00 PM
Wednesday Evening Session
Length: 30 Minutes
Description: This fun reunion of musical Information Today alumni, provides a chance to sing, dance and relieve stress in prep for a discussion about our recent past in our various communities. Join Bill Spence, Ferdi Serim, David Lee King & others as they jam and we party like there’s no tomorrow. After all, we’re celebrating and making up for all the time we could not do this together!
7:30 PM
Wednesday Evening Session
Length: 1 Hour 30 Minutes
Description: Laughter, creativity, and play are among our most powerful tools for problem solving and group decision making, but they are often left off the table when it comes to tackling society's biggest problems. Why? In this seriously fun and challenging evening event, our digital strategist and design coach lead participants through a serious play process to investigate the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on our library communities and explore how we might be creating change for a better world. No previous experience is necessary — just bring an open mind and a playful spirit. Edson and Silvers have used LEGO Serious Play, design thinking, and improvisational theater techniques to help a range of groups solve big problems, from Fortune 500 companies to global museums and libraries, philanthropies, and even the United Nations. Get some new tools and do some debriefing of the last chaotic months in our libraries and communities.