Get your coffee ready because you’ll need to be wide awake for 3 hours of Steven Cohen’s favorite online tips, tricks, tools, and resources. Cohen reveals which tools assist in making users, colleagues, and family members happy. From Firefox plug-ins to Web 2.0 startups to mashups to RSS tricks, attendees of this workshop will leave with an arsenal of information and applications to bring back to their organizations. Knowledge is power, and this workshop assists librarians of all specialties in becoming current and up-to-date with the new and most exciting web tools available.

Website design is about more than choosing pretty colors. This very interactive workshop by public and academic librarians takes you through the steps of a website redesign process, including the very important part of usability testing. After this workshop, participants will be able to identify the aspects of their websites worth saving, the parts that need to change, and how to make it happen. The focus is on the desired end results and user needs, not coding!

Learn to turn data into information that will change management’s mind about your library’s value and performance. Please bring your questions about library evaluation research and current data to this participatory workshop. Key tools and concepts needed to build your library’s value case are addressed, including data dictionaries; international and national standards for library metrics; national, state, and local datasets; online library comparison tools, statistical dictionaries, valuation tools; cost/benefit analysis and return on investment. You will define your library’s current valuation data and information needs in this interactive workshop. The primary goal is to give you a better understanding of ways to turn your current data into information that you can use to demonstrate the value of your library. The secondary goal is to start identifying additional data and information you could collect and use to advance your library’s case to upper management. Basic outcomes include a clearer understanding of the key valuation concepts and methods for presenting information to your organization’s upper management and current and potential library customers.

All around us, mountains of data are piling up in libraries and corporate intranets, but are we harnessing visual techniques and tools to make this data more useful? Can we use the many data visualization tools available to benefit library websites, customer products and services, instruction and course pages? Discover how tools such as Many Eyes from IBM’s alphworks, Swivel, Gapminder (bought by Google), and others can enable your staff and users to share, analyze, and create data visualization to show trends, patterns, associations and new insights. Some of these tools go way beyond data visualization and tap into the social dimension, encouraging sharing, collaboration, and reuse. Bring a Wi-Fi enabled laptop and try out some of the tools. Don’t have a laptop? No worries: Simply have fun working with other participants in the small group exercises. Keen to try out the water? Work with our data or BYOD (Bring Your Own Data) as a spreadsheet or text file of usage data or user comments. Create your visualization and tell your library’s story visually. Look at what happens when data goes “social” and when libraries leverage the visual to explain, inform, and aid discovery and retrieval.

In the last 5 years, library websites have grown in importance and size, creating a challenge for libraries to effectively and efficiently distribute the creation and maintenance of website content. At the same time, open source systems have gained popularity in libraries, and several open source content management systems have evolved that allow developers to easily extend existing functionality and add new Web 2.0 features. This intersection has presented libraries with the opportunity to implement open source content management systems to maintain their library websites. Learn about implementing an open source CMS for your library. This workshop will describe what a content management system is, provide an overview of the advantages to a library implementing a content management system, highlight several organizations using open source content management systems for their websites, discuss the process of selecting a CMS, and provide an overview of several content management systems. Explore WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, and see the basics of how to install and configure a basic website in each of these tools.

As all information professionals know, search does not equate to Google. Not only are there alternative general search engines beyond Google (and beyond Yahoo! and Ask and Live), there is an abundance of specialized search engines for specialized content. These search engines can be used to search for images, videos, blogs, forums, podcasts, people, and a variety
of user-generated content. Results can be categorized, clustered, or displayed graphically. Expand search opportunities on the web and learn about available alternatives, often with exotic names such as Omgili, Cuil, Blinkx, Silobreaker, Zuula, and Quintura.

Social media is a way for libraries to encourage, promote, innovate, learn, adapt, improve customer service, engage library users in new ways, deliver new content and services, and to discover and deliver what users want. With all these benefits, it’s no wonder libraries of all types and sizes are exploring the social media landscape and using blogs, twitter, Facebook, MySpace, tagging, and more. This workshop is packed with practical advice, tools, tips, and tricks on easy ways to optimize your website for this new social environment. Whether your library is small or big, this workshop guides you through steps to develop a social media plan and ways to choose the best social media for your particular goals. It looks at ways to define and measure your libraries’ success with social media efforts and reviews tools and practical, easy to implement methods for evaluating social media plans. Head back to your workplace with a draft social media plan for your library and also with some ways to evaluate your plan.

Librarians, competitive intelligence (CI) experts, and knowledge specialists will all benefit from this seminar focused on key, reliable, low-cost, as well as free, resources, services, tools, techniques and applications, including social networking sites, blogs, wikis, intranets, email alerts, RSS, and even IM. Whether you are focused on daily current awareness services, tracking the global financial crisis, or keeping your organization current about trends, competitors, and opportunities, learn how to build, maintain, and leverage CI initiatives that serve teams, communities, and organizations and improve business processes.

This workshop is for academic librarians and staff who manage web projects within their library, from those who have been given an ad-hoc assignment to those with full-time web responsibilities. Learn how to avoid scope creep from the start, how to distribute the work throughout a project team, how to get constructive input from both your users and your colleagues, and more! In this workshop, you will get hands-on practice using some of the most useful tools used by project managers and explore the challenges specific to web projects for academic libraries. Topics addressed include working with a team, identifying project sponsor and project scope, creating work breakdown structures, designing an organizational communication plan, and methods for evaluating the success of your project management techniques.