Get your coffee ready for a fast-paced 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 plugins 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.

Even with all the podcasts, videos, and Flash tutorials in the world, great library websites need great written content, and writing for the web provides unique opportunities and challenges. Learn to tailor your material to the medium by finding out what usability studies reveal about how people actually read online and what the implications are for developing microcontent, menus, and layout. Filled with examples, tips, and tricks, this workshop is a must for library website content contributors and webmasters who want to improve their sites and online writing style. This workshop covers what research findings show about formatting content, writing style, typography and layout for the web. Train your eye to spot trouble areas on your site. Practice critiquing and revising sample library webpages, and get insights into writing for social media and mobile content.

This workshop is a copyright management primer. The workshop includes discussions on copyright risk management, essential terms and conditions to include in your license agreements, managing fair use, avoiding a copyright infringement suit, contents of a Copyright Policy, making copyright compliance a reality in your library, and more! In an interactive forum, you will gain the knowledge and confidence to legally deal with copyright-protected materials and licensed e-resources in your library.

Whether you’re seeking to create a snappy dynamic interface, or to satisfy users in search of the latest and greatest animated effect, JavaScript, Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML), and the multitude of ready-made libraries and plug-ins have become the preferred tools of choice for web developers. In this workshop, we’ll look at some common interface problems and examine how to structure your HTML and CSS to implement JavaScript into your applications as a solution. We’ll also take a closer look at the concepts behind the Ajax method, provide examples of library applications of Ajax, and work through the code that makes it all happen. Walk away with an understanding of the role that JavaScript and Ajax play in today’s web apps, working examples of JavaScript in action, and the confidence to start creating your own responsive library apps.

Are you intrigued by the concept of innovation? Maybe you are a person who is known for coming up with innovative solutions, programs, or services? Or, perhaps, you want (or need) to become more innovative in your thinking and approach. Come explore, work, and play with the ideas of innovation in a half-day “playshop” that is more than just the usual workshop. Learn how to set your thinking free and let your innovative spirits play. Hear how others have bent the rules, broken them, or thrown them out the window altogether to create new approaches, projects, and programs, and discover what innovative thinking can mean to you and the job you do each day.

Bring your laptop to this hands-on workshop exploring the other side of the 2.0 revolution. Beyond the popular community sites like Twitter and Facebook, explore web-based software that lets you work online, in the cloud, and collaborate with others. Explore how this software can be used within organizations to work together on projects and documents. Learn how to embed presentations, images, spreadsheets, lists, videos, RSS feeds, documents, and other information from one 2.0 application to another site, your intranet, or within a blog. Investigate tracking options, comment capabilities, and remote hosting. Try out web-based tools that can be used to edit images, manage projects, create flowcharts, build databases, and convert files, all without needing to download and install software.

Finding information using these new services requires new search techniques and perhaps a broader view of what searching means. Sauers outlines the central concepts of Web 2.0 as convergence, remixability, and participation and applies these to new ways of finding information. He discusses tagging and folksonomies; social bookmarking; searching media on Flickr, YouTube, or Podscope; searching locally with mapping services; searching with “inside the book” services; OpenSearch plug-ins; searching web archives; desktop searching; and using data visualization while searching. He provides lots of library examples, strategies, tips, and tricks for the new world of searching.

This workshop looks at a selection of the many unique search tools for special content such as images, videos, blogs, news, forums and other usergenerated content. It explores a variety of tools for unusual topics, particularly people and related social networking site content, and different approaches to search, notably “visualization.” Hock illustrates extraordinary content and interesting new tools you may not have encountered (with some extraordinary names such as Omgili, Blinkx, Silobreaker, Zuula, and Quintura.)

With an ever-increasing number of new digital media available in the 2.0 world, the capability to deal with the enormous amount of information produced by all these media becomes increasingly important for people. At the same time, we see that information has become an essential condition for citizens to be able to actively participate in society. This workshop focuses on the use of Web 2.0 services and strategies for enabling information and media literacy in children and citizens. Using her public library’s mission, “to develop people’s information and media literacy skills in order to participate actively in the knowledge society,” Selhorst shares its media literacy framework. A number of Web 2.0 services for various target groups have been developed in this framework: development and coaching of 11 Things for Teachers, 6 Things for Pupils, Web 2.0 and Wikipedia workshops for parents, Web 2.0 tasting nights and Wikipedia workshops for citizens, development and coaching of 15 Things for city councilors. By offering this framework, the public library becomes a signpost in the media literacy landscape. Learn how you can develop a similar framework for your library.

Libraries need a structural framework of spaces that support a network of library services and operations. This workshop provides an approach that  visualizes the quality of learning spaces to ascertain potential. It discusses how learning spaces help or impede the activities, functions, and relevance of library resources. In an interactive format you will share your observations with other librarians, identify and interpret the visible requirements and physical needs to improve your learning space, and define new types of learning spaces. The program helps to answer three questions about the library and the space it occupies: What is the quality of the learning space? Where should the learning spaces, collections, and staff be located? How can we improve the “library as place”?

This workshop gives detailed strategies and timelines for the planning, marketing, and assessment of new technologies for reference services. It discusses what products (both free and proprietary) are available and how to choose which is best for your community. It includes great examples and best practices for each technology (with relevant real-world transcripts), considers issues of staff training and scheduling, promotion of new services, and relevant assessment tools and rubrics. This workshop is a great place to learn about the latest technologies for reference service and discuss possibilities for improving your service.