Rainie discusses his organization’s latest findings and why they suggest that libraries can play a role in people’s social networks in the future. He’s not going to describe how to set up a Facebook profile. Rather, he’s going to talk about the reasons that people rely more and more on their social networks as they share ideas, learn, solve problems, and seek social support. He’ll describe why the internet and cell phones have changed the way people construct and operate social networks and why libraries can act as the “node” in people’s networks.

One of CIL’s most popular sessions returns to turbo-charge your web research. Our confirmed super searcher and host of Searchers Academy provides an updated-to-the-minute and jampacked-with-valuable-tips talk about searching the web more effectively. You don’t need to be an expert to use these techniques, but even long-time researchers will learn from them.

Many folks rely heavily on online social interconnections for fun, communication, and networking. Many of the social networks are partially or fully open to public view. See what information can be mined from the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Pandora, Amazon, and any other new and popular individualized social services. Explore techniques for searching within and across these social tools, and learn what others may be able to find out about you.

Keeping up with all the changes in our industry and staying one step ahead of our clients require solid strategies to deal with this challenge. Our expert shares his ideas, learnings, top tips, and techniques from the search and search engine world to ensure that you stay in step with the fast-changing 2.0 online information world.

Besides just fascinating images, Google Earth contains extensive associated subject content that is useful in the research context. However, it’s not necessarily easy to find. After a quick overview of the range of useful content on Google Earth (from content provided directly by Google and its affiliates, to the Google Earth Community, to the public at large), this session examines the ways to easily get to what you need, including using the search and browse options pre-embedded in Google Earth, file type searching in Google for KML and KMZ files, and searching the Google Community website and blogs.

In order to spread ideas, increase learning, and accelerate science itself, there is the need for better dissemination of science knowledge. Current conventional search engines and underlying technologies do not provide access to the vast majority of science knowledge available on the web. Federated Search, as a solution to opening these scientific databases, has been implemented at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information. Warnick shares his experience and suggests an even newer combination of technologies, a better solution to a high quality science search tool just on the horizon. After sex, health is one of the most searched topics on the Web. Doszkocs highlights the best tools and search techniques in the health field. It discusses: the best consumer health search engines that tap into high quality trusted information sources on the web; how traditional keyword searching is increasingly enhanced by faceted focused search approaches, as evidenced by the MSN and Google health search engines; looks at cutting edge systems, such as SemanticMedline.com and HealthMash.com which utilize powerful semantic knowledge bases to increase relevancy, precision and intelligent query modification in searching for health topics.

Information Today, Inc. invites all conference registrants to a special welcome reception in the exhibit hall on Monday, March 30. This is a great time to renew acquaintances, meet new colleagues, sample tasty goodies, and check out the latest products and services in a relaxed atmosphere.

There are many approaches to website redesign, from the tear down and rebuild approach to the iterative and incremental change approach, but all website redesigns share common pitfalls that should be avoided. From identifying the content you should keep to protecting your Google page rank, learn valuable tips and tricks for a successful and surprise-less site redesign.

McHale kicks off this session with a pitch to have users “Steal this code” and add it everywhere on their sites, from blogs, MySpace, Facebook, personal start pages like iGoogle, departmental pages, course pages, etc. Let users steal the library and embed catalog search boxes, federated search boxes, chat widgets and other gadgets directly on their website. Sit back and watch your usage increase. Best of all, this is incredibly easy to do. What are we waiting for? Tagtmeier maps out ways to reach the mobile crowd with library content. Think this is too hard or too much work? Not so. Check out the mobile tools and start reaching the audience of early adopters and influencers who write, share, tag and recommend sites to their friends.

They’re back and their toolbox is bursting with new, useful, and fun tools to delight web visitors and webmasters. Our experts and popular speakers tour through free or inexpensive tools that save you time or pain or both as a web content provider, developer, or manager. Best of all, many of the tools can be used by anyone regardless of his/her tech know-how. As always, we’ll sprinkle in a few more advanced tools for webmasters who love to code.

Figuring out which new services to deploy to benefit students and researchers is challenging. At the University of Maryland, Kaske and Wendling studied 650 students using focus groups and individual interviews to learn about their information seeking behaviors. They developed some nifty tools to visualize the results using tag clouds, tables, and charts in order to spot trends, plan new services, and adapt library goals to target user needs. Varnum takes an indepth look at tagging and library websites. Find out how the University of Michigan library launched MTagger, a social bookmarking tool, in the winter of 2008. MTagger allows users to tag a webpage on the library site or anywhere, and catalog records, or digital images. It also offers a “collections” feature and a faceted approach for users to narrow search results. The tool was intended to enhance findability across collections and to expose “hidden” collections.

Why are so many library Facebook applications underutilized? This session illustrates an example of a new paradigm library Facebook application, the tools that are used and the process behind its development.

Information Today, Inc. invites all conference registrants to a special welcome reception in the exhibit hall on Monday, March 30. This is a great time to renew acquaintances, meet new colleagues, sample tasty goodies, and check out the latest products and services in a relaxed atmosphere.

Having a complete record of scholarly thought on a subject may mean opening up some new acquisitions channels. The Law Library of Congress is responding to new trends in scholarly publishing with a project that selects, harvests, and makes available to the public the best scholarly blogs on law related topics. This session covers lessons learned about selection criteria, metadata, and web design as well as the application of Wayback Machine software to the project.

Come hear 25 ideas, applicable for all types of libraries, for partnering with local businesses and organizations. Build alliances that will help you gain recognition, trade for otherwise-costly services, and grow local advocates. The ideas come from more than 14 years of editing a library marketing newsletter, attending conferences, and giving seminars. All ideas are listed on handouts and posted on the conference website, because you won’t have much time to take notes during this rapid-fire, energetic session!

Penning talks about the use of wikis to build communities and illustrates with real-world examples of libraries and groups using wikis for this purpose. Academic library staff members, Moss and Fitch, show how they’ve implemented wikis to train staff, student assistants, and volunteers, as well as to encourage collaboration across library departments. Smith discusses using Ning.com in college classes as an excellent tool for working together in groups. It is attractive since it has a familiar look and feel to social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, but it is private and has many functions that lend themselves to working productively together.

In 2008, libraries and museums began to offer historical photographs on the photo-sharing Website Flickr to encourage discovery of photo collections with communities that enjoy images, increase interaction with the collections, and extend their reach beyond the institutions’ own website. As part of Flickr’s Commons project, Flickr members were invited to provide tags and comments and enrich the limited information available about these images by performing a bit of history detective work. A year after launch of the Commons, a panel of speakers from the Library of Congress, Smithsonian, Brooklyn Museum, and the New York Public Library share a “look under the hood” at how community input benefitted both their institutions and the users of the collections, the challenges and costs of building and maintaining a “virtual reading room,” and lessons learned as they look toward the future.

Now that you have connected to your community through all of your social media tools, how do you keep up, stay current, and encourage more participation? The first presentation looks at how one large public library is working to stay on top of social media solutions and connected with the community it has developed while encouraging new growth. It explores a media solution that one web development company is offering clients to help manage social media communications and nurture their audience. Options for libraries of all sizes and budgets are presented with real-world examples and experience. The second presentation discusses how to encourage participation in online communities, integrate with F2F (face-to-face), make more efficient use of time, enhance bonds, and remain relevant. It explores how different modes of online engagement can be integrated to form a path, moving from passive to active engagement and from individual fulfillment to community benefit at large. Using examples from different user groups, including internal staff learning organizations and external library client communities, it addresses common barriers to engagement and strategies for movement along the continuum that overcome these barriers.

Information Today, Inc. invites all conference registrants to a special welcome reception in the exhibit hall on Monday, March 30. This is a great time to renew acquaintances, meet new colleagues, sample tasty goodies, and check out the latest products and services in a relaxed atmosphere.

The Military Education Research Library Network team at the National Defense University Library has developed an initiative to preserve, manage, organize, and make available a public internet collection of U.S. policy statements dating from 2002 to the present. Hear how they are managing challenges from creating an interface that will appeal to students, the public and an international audience, to creating proper metadata. Creech and Trainor examine how, over the past few years, libraries have been investing resources and staff time into collecting information about their electronic resources into central knowledge bases that, in most cases, is not available to users. How could the electronic resources management systems (ERMS) of tomorrow bring together description and access? What kinds of information must we record in our ERMS, and how do we get this information to users? They focus on using the rich data repository in their ERMS to enhance access to our resources, the data elements in the DLF  Electronic Resource Management Initiative report, and how this data can be used in ERMS to convey valuable metadata to our users.

In this digital age, the need for authors and publishers to protect the ownership rights of their works is more challenging and complex. Numerous DRM techniques have been developed to safeguard these rights. Yet DRM methods restrict what individuals can do with the electronic content and often endanger the information integrity of the library and the privacy of its constituents.

Speakers discuss the issues and concerns around DRM and its impact on information integrity, including the methodology and future of DRM, the privacy rights of the individual, especially students and faculty, using Creative Commons licenses, and the issues of copyright.

One of the hottest topics in information technology is “cloud computing,” in which computer resources are accessed on the network without the user needing to know much about the complex infrastructure that supports them. Libraries are beginning to take advantage of the cloud’s ability to support robust and secure services to reduce the total cost of ownership of library systems while also providing powerful new ways to interact with library data to providenew kinds of services. This session will tell (and show) you how.

Have you ever had your website designed by a highly skilled intern or volunteer who has long since left? Do you enjoy playing phone tag with your institution’s IT department that is located on a different floor of the building or even a few hundred miles away? We all know about planning for hardware requirements and ensuring operating systems are compatible with the most recent ILS release, but this presentation offers ideas that may help your library create and sustain a long-lasting IT environment, including sustainable web design, use of opensource applications, harnessing the tech skills of your library staff and negotiating with your organization’s IT department, evaluating third-party products and services, as well as looking at market tendencies and forecasting trends.

Law discusses how library users expect a search experience that rivals that of Google and other modern Web search engines, a search tool that provides unified access to the library’s entire traditional collection, as well as all of the electronic resources to which the library subscribes. He shares research conducted using focus groups, surveys of researchers at all academic levels, including faculty members and librarians, and ethnographic observations that target the problems of locating high-quality academic information among a large number of library resources. Gebhardt discusses how Broward County Library transitioned from a print-intensive environment to a nationally award-winning leader on the Web; going from 30,000 electronic visitors and 50,000 page views/month in 2004 to +350,000 electronic visitors and more than one million page views/month in 2008. She explores how the library sought feedback, techniques used to redesign the web site, building interactive communication with customers through e-mail updates and electronic invitations, and tips and tricks on how any library can re-position a reduced budget into a green promotion.

Information Today, Inc. invites all conference registrants to a special welcome reception in the exhibit hall on Monday, March 30. This is a great time to renew acquaintances, meet new colleagues, sample tasty goodies, and check out the latest products and services in a relaxed atmosphere.

Many libraries don’t have a dedicated web services staff, much less a single dedicated webmaster. This session is for those libraries struggling to provide innovative web services with little resources to devote to staff, software, or hardware. The articles and blog posts about Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 can sometimes seem impossible to implement in smaller, poorer, and/or under-technology-staffed libraries. But we too can offer excellent online services to our users!

Little libraries are often stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide; people working in small libraries must wear many hats, and sometimes just a few people are responsible for all aspects of the operation. At the same time, smaller libraries are often able to innovate quickly and efficiently due to their small size and lack of bureaucracy. Fewer organizational levels mean that when someone has an idea, instead of taking it to multiple committees and managers, they simply try it! Saving money using technology and other streamlining is not just a priority, it’s a survival mechanism. West discusses how small libraries in rural New England greet the  Library 2.0 world in style without breaking the bank, and Hough highlights examples of technology innovation in several outstanding rural libraries around the country. With limited budgets and staffing, these organizations have been able to capitalize on strong ties to community and limited organizational bureaucracy to create programs and services that are creative, meaningful, and sometimes just plain fun.

Social software can provide solutions for a myriad of problems encountered in small libraries. Crossett talks about using WordPress and other free/open source tools to build a library website, creating some shoestring usability testing, and connecting to the community in nifty ways. Jacobsen illustrates how libraries are using Google Maps, including ideas for using maps beyond  “Here we are,” community building facilitated by the creation of maps and instructions on how to create and embed a Google map. Join our panelists as they share tales from the trenches, tips, and tricks, as well as lessons learned that can be reused in your environment.

Small libraries often face the common challenges of small budgets, too few employees, limited space, minimal computer support, and inadequate time or expertise to keep up with emerging technologies or to maintain library computers. Learn how some librarians working in small libraries have transformed barriers like these into opportunities. Change your way of thinking, adjust your approach, utilize your strengths, look for opportunities, and watch things happen. Real examples illustrate how other librarians in similar situations have overcome obstacles. Come learn techniques you can start using right away.

Blogging makes it possible for small or rural libraries to reach out to patrons and to interested persons well beyond their service areas at little or no cost. Anyone with a basic knowledge of computers can have a blog up and running in just a few minutes. Add a few hours, and the blog can supplement, or even substitute for, a more conventional website. Schmidt discusses how to use popular open source blogging software, WordPress, to create an easy-to-update and time-saving website, while Garland and Lisa both discuss how they have used Blogger to develop dynamic, interactive websites to better serve the customers in their small towns. Hear their strategies, tips, and lessons learned.

Information Today, Inc. invites all conference registrants to a special welcome reception in the exhibit hall on Monday, March 30. This is a great time to renew acquaintances, meet new colleagues, sample tasty goodies, and check out the latest products and services in a relaxed atmosphere.