Explore a wealth of apps, Web 2.0 tools, and software for teaching library users in person and online. From mind mapping to white boards to screencasting to screen shots, these tools can be used in a variety of instructional settings. Check ’em out!

Have you ever been stumped at the reference desk by a financial or investment reference question? Come take a virtual tour of the course created by Santa Clara County Library and Infopeople using a FINRA grant. It is designed to teach library employees key investment and financial concepts, resources, and reference skills to more effectively meet the educational and information needs of patrons.

From tweaking Excel graphs to make them more comprehensible to selecting the data points that make the most sense for telling the story you want to tell (i.e., downloads of ebooks in a collection rather than the number of searches in the collection) to eye-catching infographics, library data can be made meaningful to users and funding sources. Creech shares some basic tools for creating these visualizations and provides resources for more advanced work.

Do you consider social networking tools a waste of time or something to use for fun or marketing? Do you doubt their usefulness for research? This cybertour provides the top tools you’ll need to mine the social web for valuable business and market insights, finding elusive statistics, monitoring your library’s brand, or even professional development. Learn how to effectively and efficiently eavesdrop on the conversational web!

From our social connections to our professional learning, we are a node in a vast connected web of people, a network. Today, professional development is an ongoing dialogue and learning process. Hear about different communication mediums and tools for building a professional learning network and ways to use it to the fullest.

Web 2.0 is designed for new and inexperienced social media users. Our Web 2.0 advocate highlights free Web 2.0 tools on the internet, offering summaries and practical applications of these tools in libraries and other working environments. She looks at creating a book review blog, social bookmarking a reference collection, developing a policy-driven wiki, recording a podcast, creating a tutorial using digital video, attracting fans on a Facebook page, and providing regular tweets on upcoming events in the library.

readIMAGINE and LittleeLit.com are collaborating to bring together librarians, business school students, animators, authors, and illustrators to develop a sustainable, affordable model for publishing and distributing digital stories in public and school libraries! The partnership involves collaborative programming in a number of different library systems in California, the development of a distribution platform, and original interactive story apps. This groundbreaking initiative will definitely spark your interest!

socialcast is a simple, secure, enterprise microblogging platform that helps employees easily connect and share in real time. OPL uses socialcast to report back on conferences, and it is used as a platform to share ideas. OPL also uses Pinterest as a visual idea share. OPL uses BiblioCommons to foster connections between their patrons, who can create lists, review and star rate items, and follow patrons that share similar reading tastes. OPL uses technology tools to connect with the community. Get tips and insights from our speaker!

Promoting collaboration and sharing of learning objects across 10 University of California (UC) campuses to leverage expertise and improve efficiency is the focus of this cybertour. Hear about the results of UC’s findings and their recommendations (including using social media, investing in an institutional repository, etc.).

QR codes have created unique opportunities to market your library’s resources. This cybertour highlights how to generate and use QR codes and discusses some unique opportunities that can come out of the use of QR codes. Help your community with smartphones and never have to write down a call number again!

Web 2.0 tools are the key to great treasures of learning, and the school library media specialist is the link to the treasure! This cybertour includes demonstrations of a variety of free web tools that can be used in K–12 classrooms through collaborative planning with classroom teachers; ideas for integrating these tools into lessons; and how to use tools such as Camstudio, Jing, Museum Box, Animoto, Vocaroo, Storybird, ZooBurst, Fotobabble, Blabberize, GoAnimate, Letterpop, BuiLD YouR WiLD SeLF, and Faceyourmanga.

In the information business, the relationship between buyers and vendors of information products and services often starts out as a buyer-seller connection, but because of the complexities of purchasing or licensing content in print or electronic form, the connection typically grows stronger. Negotiating licensing contracts becomes a key component and knowing how to conduct a good negotiation is important for any information professional responsible for obtaining technology tools, services, or content. Based on research, interviews, and experience, Hulser shares his top tips on what to do and what to avoid when going forward on negotiations and partnerships.

Our speaker wants to hear you say, “I didn’t know HTML, CSS, and JavaScript could do that!” His cybertour illustrates how a few tags and scripts can liven up a webpage (in particular with rounded buttons that change color when you click them) or give it added features (enabling touch screen presses on various mobile devices or displaying the library’s most recent blog posts).

We hear it all the time... Make good passwords! Create passwords no one can guess! Ensure your passwords are long and complicated, with capitals and numbers and special characters! This is all good advice, but difficult to implement consistently in daily life. Attend this cybertour to learn about creating and managing the best possible passwords for your library, and for yourself.

Have you ever wondered how to answer global, financial, marketing, and demographic reference questions? This cybertour discusses free, innovative tools to solve business questions. It demonstrates several resources that include cool interactive features and impressive graphics to wow your patrons and colleagues.

In this cybertour, an academic librarian shares his top 10 library research strategies. These best practices can help even the experienced searcher find credible information in databases, indexes, and search engines.

This program introduces useful apps for librarians who have two or more Apple devices such as an iPhone, iPad, or MacBook. You can learn how to use the iCloud, sync devices together, and about other useful apps for librarians to work on their projects from different places with different Apple devices without carrying files.

Based on the results of the 2012 Mount Sinai Hospital Library Value Study, this cybertour shares key strategies currently being used to reposition the library, its space, budget, outreach etc. Grab some insights and ideas to use in your community or organization.