Want to sharpen your web search skills? Find information in the real-time collaborative and social web? Learn from the experts? Join search veterans, speakers, and authors to learn the latest strategies and techniques for searching online. This fast-paced, newly updated, day-long event allows you to interact with the experts, who share their searching secrets and expertise as they focus on the most-current practices in the field of web research. There’s always something new to be learned from these leading-edge panelists. Participants should have basic experience with web searching, but even searchers with extensive internet background will find tips to polish and advance their skills and will certainly come away with new resources and tools. Academy topics include the following:

• Latest News From Top Search Engines: What are Google, Live, and Yahoo! rolling out now that are of interest to searchers?
• Hidden Tools & Features of the Major Search Engines: Learn about the undocumented and littleknown search features of the Big Three.
• The Best of the Rest: A review of the best alternative search engines for info pros and researchers
• Searching the NEW Web: Learn about what’s new in searching podcasts, tracking memes, social graphing, and other portions of the new web
• Cost-Effective Searching: Online strategies/practices for tough times to get the most for your search dollar
• Subject Search Round-Up: Hear from five experts on the specific tools and resources for searching in science & engineering, legal, government, ready reference and business topics

Does your library website need to move to the next level? Consider how to do a visual makeover, add social media tools, or new embedded services. Where do you start? What’s your strategy? See how other libraries are using content management systems (CMS), user-generated content, and database-driven content to provide customized and personalized user content. Explore how social software applications, including blogs, wikis, tagging, and RSS, fit into the mix. Learn how to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your current site using analytic tools and usability studies. Pick up new usability methods that can help you test proposed revisions early so that the new design doesn’t just look better but also works better for the users. Pack your toolbox and take home tips, tools, checklists, and new design techniques that you can immediately put to use. Learn about common pitfalls and success factors for library redesigns. Put what you learn into practice. By working in small groups, you will immediately apply what you learn throughout the day to an ongoing “extreme makeover of a library website.” Topics and exercises include the redesign process; practical project management; web content management systems; and usability, engagement,
and participation.

Online tutorials can be extremely time-intensive to create. With the need for just-in-time learning in many organizations, screencasts offer quicker ways to create informative tutorials that demonstrate online library resources, or anything else on the web or your desktop. New tools make it quick and easy to create screencasts and host them online. These programs record screen actions and add a voice commentary. Explore using free and fee software such as Jing, Camtasia Studio, and web-based services to quickly create online tutorials for your users. Compare hosting options at Screencast.com, YouTube, Blip.TV, or Freescreencast. In addition to gathering proven tips, techniques, and tricks to quick screencast creation, see examples of advanced editing features such as call outs, transitions, zooming, and highlights. Bring your own laptop to check out sites as they are discussed. Show and tell the easy way!

If a library wants to understand its patrons’ information behaviors and preferences, how its community views library services, or where there are potential partnerships within an academic environment, it should consider using focus groups. “Guided group conversations” offer libraries an
incredible wealth of information about their clients, their services, and their evolving environment. This workshop guides participants through the design of effective focus groups, from identifying participants to developing insightful questions and prompters, to facilitating the group dynamics and dialogue. Jones also covers ways to use online environments, personas, and other techniques to get—and keep—a meaningful and directed discussion going and on topic.

Tired of the online generic research tutorial and looking for something context- and content-specific that you can modify whenever you want for any course or subject? In this workshop you will learn about the development of a robust, database-driven learning object that helps students learn about research. This system is a cross-discipline, community-driven tool that allows faculty, teaching assistants, or librarians to use or edit existing records or create new content that illustrates discipline-specific research and writing practices. After an introduction to the system and its five available modules, participants will build an online learning object by contributing new content, selecting existing content, or editing existing content, thereby contributing to a database of quality, collaboratively developed material to enhance student learning.

This new interactive half-day workshop creates a sharing environment where developers highlight their creations from phone apps (Joe Murphy, Yale University), to rolling your own widgets (Nina McHale, U of Denver), getting the most out of Flash (May Chang & Kenner Miner, U of Baltimore-Maryland County), and maximizing free, third-party apps for public services (Ellen Peterson, Maui Community College). Join the library development conversation with Den Masters Aaron Schmidt and Nicole Engard. Learn from this active group of developers and share your developments. Get lots of ideas and tips to take back and use immediately in your environment.

As web content continues to grow and the noise-to-signal ratio increases, it has become important for libraries to find ways to get into users’ common web paths: the social networking sites such as Facebook, the web portals such as iGoogle, learning management systems such as Blackboard, even mobile devices such as the iPhone. Our panel of experts looks at creating widgets, gadgets, and micro library apps that allow users to have basic library search and browse functions in these new user environments free from the catalog or library website. They demo and
teach how to design mobile applications, use Google Gadgets, customize Flickr widgets, tweak Yahoo! Pipes, and integrate OpenSearch browser plug-ins to create new modes of access for library journals, books, articles, special collections and much more. Come learn how to play in these new environments and to give users options for searching and consuming library materials in their own learning spaces.

The single-most-important skill for librarians is the ability to share the library’s story in a compelling way so people want to help you succeed. This workshop helps you significantly improve your ability to “tell your story” and win support from voters, government officials, investors, or
senior management. Appropriate for all types of libraries and information services, this interactive workshop includes an overview of techniques; how to tell your library’s story using the “Three-Act Storytelling Method”; tips, tricks and techniques; and hands-on personalized practice in a safe, interactive peer group. Receive a complete manual including materials you can share with staff members who don’t attend.

So you’ve got a Twitter account and some followers but you’re not sure what’s next. Let top library Twitters show you how to make the most of your tweets. In this interactive workshop you’ll discover how to spice up your Twitter homepage, take advantage of the many Twitter tools available online, and learn how to use Twitter to actively engage your customers in conversations.

Funding is tough right now, but there are still lots of grants available! Discover the confidence and knowledge to get library grants. Learn who gives funding and how to easily find proposals, the best method for writing grant proposals, and real-life library technology grant success stories. Learn an easy-to-follow grant process cycle, including project development and grant sources. Practical advice, valuable worksheets, and resource lists are provided. Discussions will excite, motivate, and provide the knowledge to apply the basic process of grant work, develop grant projects based on a community’s needs and library planning, and identify the types of grants and where to easily locate grant opportunities.

If learning is the process of turning information into knowledge, then libraries need to be strategic about the use of information throughout the learning process. From reactive to proactive, from service provider to educational partner, from “Come to the library” to “We’re embedded in your course,” libraries have the opportunity to reposition their expertise and resources to enhance learning opportunities. Based on the application of innovation theory at Harvard Business School’s Knowledge and Library Services, learn what it takes to reposition your library by creating the capabilities (knowledge, skills, strategy, systems, and vision) to engage in curriculum design and course delivery – for embedding libraries in learning.

Website design is about more than choosing pretty colors. This very interactive workshop by public and academic librarians takes you through the steps of a website redesign process, including the very important part of usability testing. After this workshop, participants will be able to identify the aspects of their websites that are worth saving, the parts that need to change, and how to make it happen. The focus is on the desired end results and user needs, not coding!

Organizations everywhere are increasingly relying on the “cloud” (the internet writ large) for basic computing and storage services. Options such as Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offer easy “pay-as-you-go” options that don’t require a large investment in hardware and maintenance. In addition, the growing array of web services that library staff can use to improve or embellish their local systems offers an opportunity to serve your users better with little or no monetary investment. This workshop highlights opportunities, demonstrates specific examples of their use, and provides tips on how to begin taking advantage of these new services.

Libraries today face the challenge of effectively and efficiently distributing the creation and maintenance of website content. Many libraries also want to add new Web 2.0 features to their website. Open source content management systems present an opportunity for libraries to meet these challenges. This workshop will provide an overview of several content management systems, their features, and functionality. Presenters will demonstrate how open source CMSs can be used to enhance library websites. Participants will have the opportunity to explore WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. Bring your laptop and get the most out of the hands-on time to configure a basic website in each of these tools and compare them.

Join our gamers and gadget lovers for an evening of fun and playing. Bring your latest games and gadgets and try out each others. See if you are a guitar hero, winning Wii bowler/golfer, or rank as a dancing DDR expert. Led by gamer/gadget gurus Aaron Schmidt, Jenny Levine and Erik Boekesteijn, this evening is filled with fun, networking, and of course, learning and laughing. Refreshments included.