Join this interactive forum and discuss with your colleagues the small and large topics most important to you, your library, and your community. Bring ideas from the conference and share conversations with your colleagues. Gain insights and inspiration from industry leaders. Jump-start your plans for new and exciting programs for your community. Brainstorm, bounce ideas, and bring your success stories.

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.

RSS feeds are an excellent way to receive information from the internet. What many people don’t know is that you can receive that information and easily repurpose and republish it on your website with little technical knowhow. Imagine automatically posting up-to-date local or industry headlines on your library’s home page. This is what you can do in just a few simple steps. Our expert internet trainer shows you how. This workshop also covers additional RSS tools and services, including one that will create feeds from content without its own feed and another that will automatically turn your text-based content into a podcast.

Online tutorials used to be extremely time intensive to create. With the increase in reference and instruction to distant users in all types of libraries and the need for just-in-time learning in many organizations, we need quicker ways to create tutorials to transfer information and demonstrate online library resources. New tools make it quick and easy to create online demonstrations and tutorials with a minimum of effort, to record screen actions, and to add a voice commentary. Explore using software such as Camtasia, Captivate, and Wink to quickly create online tutorials for your distance users.

Learn all about the alternative approach to building web applications as seen in popular Web 2.0 sites such as Google Maps, Flickr, and Netvibes. Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) is changing the way that users are able to interact with web applications. These changing user expectations can and will have implications for the next generation of library applications. This workshop introduces the concepts behind the Ajax method, provides examples of library applications of Ajax, and walks through the code that makes it all happen. Walk away with an understanding of Ajax, working examples of Ajax in action, and the confidence to start creating your own Ajax apps.

As one of the fastest-growing online social networking sites, Facebook has more than 34 million members, is ranked as the 10th-most-visited website, and has the greatest number of user-provided photos. This workshop reviews the major features and functionalities of Facebook, as well as select Facebook and third-party Facebook applications that have potential for facilitating and promoting educational and library programs and services. It provides examples of library use of Facebook, both local and national, that reach out to their clientele and looks at research about the site.

With the increasing number of online services offered by libraries, are we forgetting the fundamentals of customer service in our drive to meet our patrons’/customers’ evolving needs? With chat, email, phone, Twitter, MySpace, and other Library 2.0 service points becoming more prevalent, is your library presenting and maintaining a consistent level of service on all fronts? A veteran of customer service at Gateway, Seagraves utilizes best practices from customer service strategies used in the for-profit sector and provides the techniques and strategies to initiate or enhance your own library customer service training program. From quality control to customer satisfaction surveys, whether the interaction is at the front desk or via Meebo, the principles of customer service must be applied in order to provide the best patron experience, no matter where the contact originates.

This workshop focuses on cool tools for navigating and searching content. Come and explore the application of free web tools such as Clipmarks, del.cio.us, Flickr, YouTube, Furl, Google Maps, and Zotero in the research process. Using examples of research projects commonly assigned in California schools, speakers show how students can use social bookmarking sites, browser plug-ins, and free web services to find resources, take notes, and organize content, ideas, quotations, and references while surfing and searching online. Attendees try out tools while enacting the roles of both students with research agendas and the information professionals who may assist them. By applying pedagogy to new technologies, teachers and librarians can facilitate the active learning of research skills with the help of these tools. Research scenarios/examples from the curriculum include using del.icio.us and Clipmarks to build a set of resources with and for students using YouTube, del.icio.us, and Furl to help students document their science projects, building a knowledgebase to present a single body of information, using Flickr and Google Maps to build a mashup and add texture and knowledge to a literature assignment, and more.

del.icio.us for subject guides, Flickr for library displays, YouTube for library orientation . . . Mashups and APIs (application programming interfaces) are becoming staples of modern web design. Libraries, as repositories of data, have a wealth of information that could be placed within the mashup context. With new tools and scripts available daily, it’s becoming easier and easier to bring pieces of the web together and enable users to find and build new web services with library data. This workshop focuses on what an API is and what it can do, the standard components of web services, how to build a simple mashup with JavaScript, how to work with PHP to consume a web service and create a mashup, what web services and mashups mean for libraries, how to start consuming and creating web services for your library with available tools and scripts. Come learn how open data standards and a little “knowhow” can change your library services. Hear what others are doing and what you can do too! (Participants should be comfortable with HTML markup and have an interest in learning about web scripting and programming.)

For those who would like to explore more advanced features of screencasting software, this in-depth workshop builds on Notess's morning workshop and provides proven tips, techniques and tricks to create compelling online tutorials. Using many examples, Notess explores using call outs, transitions, zooming, highlights, Flash quizzes, and many of the other advanced features of Camtasia Studio, Wink, Jing, and Captivate.

This workshop shares practical and proven instructional strategies and methods for trainers to engage clients in “just in time training,” instructor-led demonstrations, or hands-on web searching workshops whose goal is to produce better online researchers. Based on information seeking behavior studies and research by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! search engine developers, attendees learn instructional techniques useful for teaching the novice and the seasoned web searcher. The features of the most popular search engines are reviewed and expected enhancements are shared. Learn how to develop a simple and effective web searching methodology tailored to address the needs of your users and get tips for teaching clients how to save time and resources by exploiting the search engine features to retrieve fewer and more relevant results. The advantages and disadvantages of various training methods employed by expert trainers are discussed as are techniques for promoting training and earning repeat business from satisfied clients.