With online presences on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, library professionals often fear this new transparency into their personal and professional lives. How much personal information is appropriate to share with your library patrons? Can library staff create a professional online persona without adopting a new, secret identity? Most importantly, why would a librarian ever want to use a social network? Building on the research in Murphy and Moulaison’s paper “Social Networking Literacy Competencies for Librarians,” the fundamental necessary social networking skills for librarians are addressed along with strategies for helping library staff feel comfortable presenting a digital face to their patrons, employers, and colleagues online. Issues raised include what online services to use, how to keep private info private, using your online identity for library outreach and marketing, steering an already-established online presence into a professional one, making the connection between paper resume and digital profile, and using your online persona as a powerful professional networking tool.

Libraries collect mountains of data: circulation records, online search traffic, reference desk questions. But, too often, too few people see too little of it. Speakers show how to collect and format data for data aggregators, how to deploy open data frameworks using no-cost tools, and suggest ways to present the information to distinct audiences. Exposing this information to more eyes can have real, functional benefits. Revealing circulation data can give patrons a better sense of the shape of a collection, guiding them to highly sought-after resources. Showing search logs to patrons can of course suggest new searches, but also that they might adapt their search techniques in context. By presenting relevant data to patrons and various library stakeholders, we can better reflect the role, tasks, and value of library work.

Libraries have created large collections of online full-text resources and innovative portals for information access. Yet many users find library systems too complex and unreliable. They often consider our integrated services just plain broken. Webster discusses user expectations for usability and reliability and addresses system-wide approaches needed to avoid creating “broken” information systems in times of high expectations. Chen and Germain discuss strategies for facilitating better usability practices based on their research of 113 academic members of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) that showed 25 (30%) libraries had policies/standards/guidelines dedicated to web usability; 71(85%) libraries have conducted usability testing on their main websites, online public access catalogs (OPAC), or lower-level pages; and only seven libraries (6%) performed iterative testing of these platforms at pre-, during, and post-design stages.

With tough economic times and libraries feeling increased use of all of their services, stories of creative responses abound. Alcorn shares some real-life responses by libraries and librarians to the current economic downturn, highlighting innovative responses, including creative staffing, technology initiatives, partnerships with local organizations, and enhanced programming. Examples include webinars to “host” job searching workshops, hands-on resume writing workshops with grants for a mobile laptop lab, partnering with local economic development groups on seminars or webinars for small business owners, potential entrepreneurs, and more. Coyne discusses how to turn your research paper or book from a dead tree into a dynamic digital springboard that can access important usage data and links to similar content direct from your cell. He explores real-world uses from a major publisher: how mobile QR Codes — 2-D bar codes that embed useful and actionable information — are able to link the printed page to the always up-to-date digital world.

Murphy explores what is new in text messaging reference in terms of technology, proprietary and free products, service models, customer expectations, skills for librarians, and what is on the horizon. Knowledge Ontario speakers discuss the ability to add voice to instant messaging (IM)-based virtual reference interaction. Although the use of VoIP is not widely deployed by libraries and its costs and impact are not fully understood, they share experiences of askON’s VoIP pilot project.

Across libraries, the OPAC is fast disappearing with the SOPAC (Social Online Public Access Catalog) as its successor. A SOPAC can also be thought of as a social knowledge network. A social library improves a knowledge worker’s ability to find relevant and high-quality information faster, fosters collaboration, and increases productivity across an organization. Social libraries deliver everything traditional libraries deliver while at the same time enhancing the value of the library by incorporating how the community of users relates to and enhances the information. The SOPAC is founded on collaboration and knowledge creation, enhances the user experience, breaks down information silos, and improves productivity of the library’s knowledge assets. This session covers the fundamentals of “going social,” including pitfalls and best practices, and discusses how social knowledge networks provide a unique framework for managing and enhancing library collections. The result is a secure, two-way information exchange that transforms libraries into true collaboration centers.

This session looks at the many new features of SOPAC 2.1 — from wish lists and auto-renewals to Twitter integration. 2.1 represents a major step forward toward making SOPAC the patron-centric catalog it’s intended to be. It discusses exciting improvements planned for 2.2 as well as SOPAC’s strategic road map that envisions an entirely different type of future library.

This first presentation looks at one library's experience migrating to Koha from a Classic Dynix system. By using a hybrid model of OS and proprietary software, the functionality needs were met. The Middletown Library ILS team knew it had limited technical expertise to take on an OS project, so it took a flexible posture, partnering with a developer, to not rewrite Koha, but get it to work with its existing RFID and self-checkout system, a computer management, and a phone notification system. The second presentation addresses the design, implementation, and maintenance of a Drupal sites/server for a consortium of 30 libraries.

Bibliomation, the largest library consortium in Connecticut, is converting its member libraries to an open source ILS. Members range from small school media centers to large urban public libraries, and it has initiated a pilot program with nonmember libraries. The beta tester libraries include libraries in some of the largest cities in the state and libraries so small they lack both ILSs and bathrooms. The OSS team from Bibliomation will discuss its conversion process, from both technical and personnel perspectives with an emphasis on the staff education required within Bibliomation, member libraries and the nonmember pilot libraries.

Breeding looks at the current automation scene and shares his research as well as leading examples set by libraries in North America and other geographic regions. Gain insights as you plan for the future of your next-gen catalog.

If libraries, museums, and other institutions exist for the increase and diffusion of knowledge, how do we do it digitally and how do we make it happen? Edson discusses the Smithsonian’s emerging digital strategy and shares the challenges and many techniques being used to move plans forward to achieve the institution’s new vision of a Smithsonian Commons — a critical mass of content, services, and tools that could be given to the world for free, no strings attached. Gain lots of insights, ideas, and practical tactics for creating your tomorrow.

The issues, decisions, and problems we face are increasingly complex. Critical thinking, or productive dialogue, is an approach for ensuring we are focusing on the right problem and not muddying the waters with past, biased assumptions that we may not even realize we have or trying to reach decisions on our own. Speakers guide you through the basics of critical thinking and the difference these steps make in reaching the right decision. Wallace illustrates how the HBS Baker Library uses this approach and highlights the challenges and breakthroughs.

Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs or just MMOs to gamers) are some of the most popular types of PC games, especially Blizzard Entertainment's hugely successful and wildly popular “World of Warcraft” (or “WoW”). Many library staffers find deep value in the combination of a fantasy gaming franchise with a virtual, online social environment, and this value greatly enhances game play. Moderated by veteran World of Warcraft player David Lisa, this panel showcases their experiences with WoW: how gaming is shaping the future in information and community access, instituting WoW as a library program and service, the WoW guild “Libraries and Librarians,”and the positive impact of the game upon the players’ lives.

This session discusses current trends and explores a spectrum of partnerships. From merged institutions to collection development agreements and staff education, there is a multitude of options and practices to consider in approaching prospective partners. Covered are lessons learned, successes and challenges, tools and vendor support. Examples include a number of geographically close institutions as well as distance collaborations. Being proactive in partnering makes fiscal, managerial, and strategic sense in the global library community. Practical lessons in positioning your library relationships within your institution, to your management, and externally are highlighted.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library, an international consortium of natural history museum libraries, botany libraries, and research institutions, is taming the “too much feedback” beast by implementing Gemini: one-stop shopping feedback management software. Linked at the item level within the public interface, all feedback now is deposited in one place, with issues assigned to appropriate parties for swifter resolution and improved service. Hear tips about streamlining processes and learn from our speakers’ experiences. The second presentation focuses on how Dutch libraries recently discovered the importance of proving their worth to their stakeholders. Just pushing numbers to their boards was no longer good enough. Changing budgets, the rise of the internet, and library users who rely on Google have a big impact on how to communicate with both boards and library workers. The Library Scorecard, based on the Balanced Scorecard management method, international ISO library indicators, and an adapted performance management software tool, now gives librarians an instrument to gather library management information and use it in an active way. Using case studies, De Bruyn illustrates how libraries report to their management, inform their users and explain to their library workers what’s going on using this SaaS application.

The first presentation focuses on the Department of Defense’s DoDTechipedia, which uses the power of the enterprise to meet current challenges and be prepared to respond to future challenges. DoDTechipedia represents a suite of services: wikis, blogs, and other Web 2.0 tools to enable enterprise awareness and interaction on a range of topics. It provides a family of services that users control, and the new knowledge is developed from the group interaction, open for revision and update. To get the best information to commanders and decision makers, both official and user-provided content are leveraged and disseminated through multiple formats. Berkes discusses how she employs wiki technology as a tool for sharing institutional knowledge with the public — in effect, creating an online subject encyclopedia, the Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia. She shares how authoritative information from research files and experts was made available to the internet public, how it boosted web traffic; and averted the growing strain on reference staff to respond to queries. She offers tips on how other libraries and museums can use wikis to share their specialized body of knowledge with the world.

This session looks at how SharePoint fits in the library environment. It covers the coordination of collaboration, capturing and organizing “corporate” knowledge, and organizing digital content and demonstrates how librarians can program their department’s SharePoint site without code. It illustrates, using library examples, how applications can organize corporate knowledge and documentation for strategic decisions; map information to workflow best practices; update crucial information; migrate library databases and folder content from the on-site servers; create dashboards to show “newsflash” information from each department of the organization; and organize collaborative workspace for staff to share, update, and maintain knowledge and documents with version control and approval features.

With many Drupal library applications, tools, and practices, this interactive discussion is for Drupal users and those looking to use Drupal. Join this facilitated discussion to share your experiences, tips, insights, and lessons learned and to pick up new ideas, practices, and strategies.

This session discusses how one library investigated 11 possible search enhancements, and narrowed them down to four based on customer needs, system architecture, resource capabilities, funding, and buy-in from the top. She explains the importance of already-existing architecture, statement of work, vendors, developers, Section 508 compliance, customer surveys, and on-site visits. She highlights features investigated — contextual linking, faceted navigation, implementing search histories, user-contributed tags, display of chunks, recommendations, tag clouds, tree maps, mobile device compatibility, user manipulated output, collaborative searching in virtual worlds — and why some features were seriously considered and other features were rejected. She shares learnings including that search tools should be easy to implement, involve developers in the process, and document the step-by-step process of search implementation.

Linwood discusses how she was tasked by the VP of product stewardship to help his group use new tools to build a collaborative community. Using new collaborative software from IBM Lotus called QuickR and Connections resulted in many pitfalls, including hardware difficulties, software loading, and interactions between existing software packages and the new collaborative software. Speakers in the second presentation discuss how they learned that true marketing is different from public relations or mere advertising and how they tackled marketing in their organization — forming a committee, brainstorming ideas, getting feedback from clients, making mistakes, and learning from them. All speakers provide real examples and share their learnings.

With so many learning management systems on the market, including the freebies and open-source, where do you start? Reed explains what to expect from an LMS and LCMS (learning content management system), what’s available — from the most popular to the unknown — selection criteria for choosing a system (including factoring in costs for open-source), and how to get buy-in from administration.

With the U.S. President totally “connected,” and with many government forms, job applications, and college courses online, being digital is almost required. Sadly, being digital is not the norm for everyone. How do we move late adopters — both staff and library users, including professors, attorneys, or senior citizens — out of their nondigital comfort zones? This session provides tips and techniques for moving them to the online world and describes two different methods instructors used to bring technology into their libraries — structured, weekly, hands-on classes and staff members participating in Technology Tapas, a self-paced, online weekly tutorial modeled after the 23 Things program created by Helene Blowers and implemented at the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County. These two radically different instruction methods met the needs of their respective libraries because of the instructors’ determination to overcome the reluctance and fear of their learners.

Talk about innovative training approaches! Newman and Coleman show how to use “The Cloud” to develop, schedule, organize, market and evaluate training for free or with very minimal expenditure. Rondinella and Kreger describe how Stark County successfully grew a mobile patron/staff training lab. Their overview includes: purchasing and maintenance of the mobile lab and its hardware, policies regarding training and server access (Coping with your IT Department), and developing an effective class curriculum for the community.

Learning and training occurs in synchronous, asynchronous, and hybrid environments. Miller identifies which category of learner may benefit best from both the type of environment and the delivery methods used. Farkas teaches for San Jose State University’s School of Library and Information Science using Drupal and other social software tools in place of the traditional course management system. She discusses how she uses Web 2.0 technologies to transform the learning experience and how others can harness the power of these technologies in their own teaching.

During a time of budget crises and belt tightening, new approaches to the instructional librarian role need to be invented. A team approach permits collaboration across departments and skill sets. Hear how one university has a team incorporating the skills of the information literacy librarian, distance education librarian, digital designer, and the data services librarian. This panel discusses how they support instructional technology, accomplish projects without budgetary support, and walk through their workflow for a project to demonstrate how collaboration on a shoestring can work to benefit their users.

Join our famous evening of fun and learning. Hear from our authors, speakers and Computers in Libraries experts on their views of dead and innovative technologies affecting our libraries now and as we create the future. Open to all.