Innovation and change are critical for all libraries.This unstructured discussion focuses on creating an innovative environment and includes information about the Kansas library community’s culture that has included innovation for many years.

Successful projects targeting the youngest of library patrons through gaming, computing, and other digital devices can have a strong impact on school readiness and build a foundation for digital literacy. Join this open discussion of strategies and practices for programs in your community.

The ebook industry is still young and shaking out. There are lots of positive aspects and challenges for libraries. Join this open discussion with your colleagues and get ideas to improve the situation in your library.

Based on his new upcoming book, ReCivilizing, our speaker discusses the rise of citizen-led regeneration of communities and nature. He focuses on the use of new technologies such as crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, and crowdmapping to support these initiatives. Exploring these trends, Cunningham Illustrates how public and private libraries can grow their relevance (and funding) by integrating their online resources with new online tools.

This session explores how the changes going on in content technologies right now will impact libraries and the opportunities they will present. In 2012, Flipboard and Pinterest recentered the user in terms of online curation, sharing, and visual discovery. 24Symbols and other cloud-reading services are liberating the reader from the device. Apple, a major mobile content driver, became the world’s most valuable company. Amazon’s newest Kindle eReaders and Fire tablets are already making major waves. We have seen hints at what tech and consumer trends will disrupt reading as usual in 2013. Murphy outlines the major trend areas of digital content production and consumption, explores the top players that are impacting econtent, and explains how libraries can close the gap between user expectations and library possibilities. Breeding shares research findings and the technology platforms and organizational strategies that have emerged to facilitate resource sharing.

Change in the publishing world: Four of the “big six” won’t sell ebooks to libraries at all, and two have unsustainable models. So, Douglas County Libraries set off in their own direction to discover ways to purchase content that their patrons desire while encouraging publishers to work with libraries. They have signed contracts with more than a dozen publishers and are working with many more. Learn more about the way they took control of their econtent, and provided new ways to discover and utilize this collection. Learn techniques to negotiate with vendors, explore ebook content management and collection development, and gather tools to market your econtent to your community.

By setting clear goals and expectations, information professionals can make the most of the meeting and develop a mutually beneficial relationship with the content sales people. Get tips from a long-time salesperson, supporter of libraries, and recent author and from a librarian who has been on both sides—sales and purchase!

Duke and Yale Law schools have two of the most successful open access online institutional repositories in North America. Delivering more than 12,000 objects and 2-million-plus downloads to a global audience, the Yale Law School Legal Repository and the Duke Law Scholarship Repository are turning into indispensable resources for scholars and practitioners across the world. Join our speakers to hear how these two law schools are using their repositories to extend the global reach of their scholarship, and enhance their value within the academic community. Topics include platforms, permissions, staffing, workflows, outreach, and publicity.

This fast-paced session shares a large amount of information about digitizing archives, preserving personal and local history, and more. Gray provides tips on digitizing an archive of 50,000 photographs of art objects created in Europe during the 13th through 20th centuries. Ashenfelder discusses the challenges facing the general public regarding the proper preservation of their digital stuff and shares best practices for preservation that are in line with institutional digital preservation. Sarnowski describes tools and techniques for creating local history online, including photos, journals, oral histories (audio) using standard formats and LC metadata. Putt looks at the digitization and archival efforts and their benefit for researchers in the recent history of the Woody Guthrie archives.

Picture an ideal world where your customers quickly and easily get the information they are looking for. They no sooner arrive at your site than they are reading, commenting, or downloading.What elements would your website include in that ideal world? Single sign on? Integrated catalog? Faceted search? Federated search? More downloads? This session lists the most coveted website elements and breaks them down into bite-size pieces. Come away with new ideas on how to make that ideal world a reality!

Library websites are slowly transforming into powerful, and more importantly, easy to use tools. In order to develop the latter, it is essential to perform constant and consistent usability testing. Hear how Memorial University of Newfoundland is trying to create a culture of thoughtfulness toward our users through the establishment of a web usability team. Learn why usability is important, how it implemented the new team and directions the schools are going in. Then hear how one library paid attention to the evolving needs of users, employed user-friendly open source tools to engage clients, created collaborative spaces, and improved the UX with new information delivery functionalities and mobile solutions.

This lightening round looks at making services usable to people in different situations and is jam-packed with information. Oldham highlights tools to test the accessibility level of your websites and the requirements of WCAG 2.0. Cervone looks at common accessibility issues with mobile sites and websites and how to address them while creating a visually stimulating and interactive environment for all. Chen provides tips on how to use CSS3, HTML5, ARIA, and JavaScript to make websites more accessible. Karpinski shares results of usability testing for today’s seniors, including which elements improved or reduced the site’s usability for adults aged 60 or older.

With the increasing mobility of today’s library users, websites are needed that are compatible and usable on mobile devices. Though the size of the screen has changed, Davidson and Robinson believe that the lessons learned from Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think are relevant and can be applied to mobile websites. They examine mobile library webpages from around the country with an eye to Krug’s clear and practical tips and advice. McHale examines strategies that libraries can adapt to employ “Mobile First” (the mobile user at the heart of development) and “Responsive Web Design,” two emerging web development trends, and discusses the implications these approaches have on the delivery of online library services.

As the rest of this track has demonstrated, the principles and practices of UX design are particularly pertinent when it comes to designing web interfaces and systems. But there are wide-ranging benefits to applying these same principles and practices to everything libraries design, from service desks to signage. Join us for the final presentation of the UX track as Etches and Schmidt explore ways to harness UX principles to improve virtual touchpoints, as well as physical ones.

Are senior leaders getting the right message from your management reports? Are your reports a useful vehicle for your department or just part of the routine information you deliver to your manager? Do you want to learn how to communicate the importance of all of your library’s contributions to your organization but find that your metrics lack substance? Join our experienced leaders for this practical session to learn why management reporting is so critical for libraries, discover current management reporting trends, hear about management reporting at three federal libraries and see sample management reports, learn what statistics to track, how to turn them into real management information, and how to present your metrics effectively. Included are a list of metrics you can use in your own management reports.

Despite clear success with clients and following professional best-practice in its sector, the Library of the European Parliament found some of its primary stakeholders, the individual members, to be skeptical of its value. Continuing from work on the real use of information by parliamentary representatives, the library focused on what “value” could mean in this context and how it could be increased. The conclusions were challenging - echoing other work on value in libraries, as reported by Megan Oakleaf for ACRL, but have sparked creativity and a new direction. Gain insights and ideas to use in your organization from the lessons learned in this library.

[THIS SESSION HAS BEEN CANCELED.] Content management (CM) has been a rising challenge for most organizations. From the time the content is created and routed for approvals, to the time it is archived, it becomes a challenge for the organization to maintain the integrity of the document. SharePoint Enterprise Content Management features can help the company throughout the entire life cycle of the document. It has become not just a collaboration tool, but a full-blown document and record management system. With the new and enhanced features such as Managed Metadata, In-Place Records Management, Content Organizer, etc., it is equipped to address the challenges that the company faces in managing its information. Hear how these features can be applied in order to effectively manage and preserve the integrity of the company’s information and support the complete life cycle of documents in your organization.

The sheer number of LinkedIn Groups devoted to competitive intelligence (CI) and knowledge management (KM) is overwhelming. Even the hardiest 21st-century networked professional soon runs out of gas attempting to select the best groups to monitor. Our speakers, two experienced road warriors, have done the test drives for you. For the past 3 months, they have monitored more than 60 different CI and KM LinkedIn Groups, evaluating them against criteria that looks under the hood and kicks the tires. They lay out their road maps to CI and KM LinkedIn Groups, saving you from detours and dead ends, and delivering the directions needed to integrate LinkedIn Groups into your evolving professional practice.

In 3+ years of research on enterprise deployment of mobile content, FreePint has seen stunning acceleration of activity around delivering content to mobile devices. From “Not interested!” in Year 1, to “Could be, let’s see” in Year 2, to “We need to figure this out NOW!” in Year 3,mobile content has jumped up the priority list with incredible speed. Libraries have to manage their organization’s mobile strategy as a service provider, an aggregator of content and a user, and each of these areas offers plenty of challenging questions: App or platform? Which content, in which format? Cutdown website or native development? How to work with vendors around contracts and licensing? Bring-your-own-device or restricted devices? And what about security? Get the tools to take back to your own organizations to evaluate the landscape and ask in collaboration with the others (leadership, IT, users) who needs to be part of your mobile strategy and solutions.

Learn how to stay safe by seeing how the bad guys work. See firsthand how hackers exploit common vulnerabilities in websites to trick your visitors into downloading malware. Learn how passwords are hacked and other common tricks of the trade the bad guys are using to cause trouble.

For the past decade, the LAMP (Linux, Apache,MySQL, PHP) stack has reigned supreme. Web technologies have evolved, however, and the LAMP light no longer shines as brightly as it once did. This session is for coders and noncoders alike who wish to hear about the next generation of high-performance web technologies. You’ll learn about server-side JavaScript using node.js, simplifying with CoffeeScript, full-text indexing with Sphinx, persistent key-value storage with Redis, and going commando with NoSQL packages such as CouchDB. These are the technologies that are going to power tomorrow’s web—learn about them now.

For the past 10 years, Breeding has authored an annual Automation Marketplace feature published by Library Journal that details major automation events and product developments. Come hear the latest news about business transitions, new technologies recently launched, and how libraries are voting with their pocketbooks for the best tech products.

When SUNY Cortland wanted to up its video service to one that could serve many people in many places at once, it chose Ensemble Video. Memorial Library had an extensive video collection (VHS and DVD) that was limited to a few patrons being able to view each title at a time. Learn how the collaboration of a librarian, instructional technologist, and digital media specialist evolved into a new direction for presentation of media at SUNY Cortland. Speakers walk through the initial phases of the video conversion and the roll-out of an Ensemble streaming video service to the campus, as well as future applications and plans of Ensemble. Hear about their experiences, obstacles, challenges, successes, and lessons learned.

In 2012, Cleveland Public Library (CPL) began offering a personalized, virtual desktop to library patrons. Dubbed myCloud, the virtualized desktop offers patrons an environment that they can customize to their liking—including installing software and saving documents to CPL servers. Before launch, there were many questions to be answered—both technological and legal. Speakers discuss the process of setup, launch, and management of a virtual desktop program in a large, urban public library and share their customers’ delight!

The 24/7 buzz about 21st-century skills turned into a deep institutional conversation at Burke School during the last 3 years, with Howland and Faust serving as the facilitators. Out of this grew a comprehensive and mission-driven guide to teaching and learning in the 21st century. In this session, they present the resulting framework, titled “How We Learn: A Model for the 21st Century.” The pair demonstrate how to connect theory (the model) with the real world (an authentic demonstration of learning) through one Big Sister/Little Sister project involving 4th graders and kindergarten students, picture books, research skills, media literacy and production, student connection, and teacher collaboration.

Does your library have original content or want to help teachers and students to create ebook projects? This session gets you started on the road to in-house ebook publishing. Uhlmann shows you some low-cost content creation tools, reviews a spectrum of examples from basic to highly enhanced ebook prototypes, and examines the pros and cons of several commonly used publishing standards device platforms.

This presentation offers an authentic example of student inquiry and critical thinking embedded in an ISTE-SIGMS award-winning project created for the presidential election. Kliegman provides a model of how to repackage your teaching with the academic vocabulary and rigor required by the Common Core State Standards. Come hear practical advice and strategies, and get the know-how to create dynamic lessons that encourage collaboration among teachers, librarians, students, and educational technologists!

While interacting with others online can be enriching, there is more to a “connected life” than chatting. Cordell examines how you can utilize the power of the internet to communicate, collaborate, create, curate, and contribute to learning experiences in any library setting ... even a virtual one.

Join two experts on the vital subject of finding free educational resources online. First, Heather Braum discusses open educational resources, a rising trend in classrooms, in libraries, and in DIY education circles. Learn how you can make the move from traditional textbooks and classroom resources and discover the what OER has to offer your library, school, and community. Then, hear veteran web resource locator Gary Price discuss discovery and finding tools, techniques, and even the necessary mindset you need to unearth the best digital content for education — so you can serve up just what’s needed for that social studies class, just when it’s needed.

This year’s fun and learning event can only be described as Cybertours meets Pecha Kucha meets Battledecks meets TED! Join us for an inspiring session of the most amazing ideas you will want to implement in your library immediately. Projects range between super simple things you can do today to the “omg I totally wish we could do that,” to low-cost wonders and high-priced dreams. Speakers discuss programming, technology, and other ways to enhance customer experience in all different types of libraries. Leave the status quo behind and return to work inspired, ready to transform your world.