Want to sharpen your web search skills? Find information in the real-time and collaborative 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 an extensive searching backgroundwill find tips to polish and advance their skills and will come away with new resources and tools. Academy topics include the following:

• Hidden Tools & Features of the Major Search Engines: Learn about the new and little-known search features of the major search engines.
• Searching the Social Web: Learn about what’s new in searching the collaborative web, real-time news monitoring, and data-mining the hive mind.
• Cost-Effective Searching: Online strategies/practices to get the most for your search dollar and your time.
• How to Search When You Don’t Have a Clue: Find out how to approach an entirely new area, and how to keep your client’s confidence
• Subject Search Round-Up: Hear from experts on the specific tools and resources for searching in a variety of specialized 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 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.

Planning has gotten a bad rap. Too often, libraries see strategic planning as a series of time-wasting meetings and flipcharts that result in a plan that’s rarely referred to and not implemented. It doesn’t have to be that way! Using an accelerated planning model, many successful libraries draft their plan quickly and with as much staff engagement as possible. Learn how to adapt this accelerated planning process for your library, and leave with a draft plan to discuss with your colleagues when you return to work. If your library is working on technology plans, staffing plans, succession plans, or digital service plans, start with this workshop. Whether you work in a public, academic, school, or corporate library, it’s critical to consider the long-term implications of your library’s future, and to engage staff and stakeholders in those decisions before you design any other plans. Jones focuses on the critical elements of strategic planning, determining your strategic goals in days (not months!), and, most mportantly, how to ensure these goals are implemented.

Why is video so much more engaging for clients? What is a video blog and why use one on your library’s website? This in-depth workshop, featuring experts in the field of library podcasting and videocasting, answers these questions and more. Come explore and discuss how libraries are using videocasts for outreach and learning through a variety of case studies, including tips on what types of content work best for different types of libraries. Detailed information on what to consider when planning for and implementing videocasting at your library are provided along with an up-close and personal look at a variety of creation tools. Join this active group of video experts and have a look at some cameras, focus on the process of videocasting, learn how much time is needed for lighting and storyboarding, and how to create a successful video for your purposes.

Are you a solo web developer with an interest in learning basic web scripting? A newbie thrown into your library web programming role because nobody else raised their hand? Somebody with a little more experience but always looking to improve your programming skills? This workshop is for you. We’ll work through the basics of web programming, simple-to-use embed code, and highlight resources to continue learning. Our emphasis will be on mashups and web services as a means to practice these skills. Featured topics include image mashups using JavaScript and Flickr; simple data visualization with the Google Charts API; search suggestions using the Yahoo! BOSS API; mapping data with Google Maps; learning how JavaScript (jQuery) and PHP work together to create advanced search mashups with the Worldcat API; widgets and gadgets that plug/play with Worldcat and other bibliographic services; wizards and tools to simplify mashup and programming processes including Yahoo! Pipes and Google Code Playground. Note: Attendees are encouraged to bring a laptop to play along with the examples and have a familiarity with HTML.

Media monitoring as we know it is evolving. Learn the latest methods, tools, and techniques used in the world of communications, politics and public affairs to extend your existing monitoring service with insight and analysis for better decision making. This hands-on workshop introduces you to simple and advanced tools you can use immediately. It includes a survey of the latest tools and applications and illustrates their use with real world products and services. This workshop will be of interest to competitive intelligence professionals and anyone looking to ramp up their media monitoring service and to impress their customers.

Learn how and why to create positive user experiences in your interactive digital spaces. Work with two experts in library web design and user experience design to learn some tips, tricks, and best practices that you can implement immediately. Discover best practices for designing interactive digital spaces: websites, catalogs, mobile devices, and even managing web presences we have little control over (like database interfaces, ebook interfaces, and social media sites). Come and learn to do the following: improve the overall usability of your digital spaces; design to meet user needs and goals as well as your own organizational objectives; improve the elegance and beauty of your designs; reduce the number of steps users must take to meet their objectives; reduce excessive features that do not meet user needs; and create manageable project plans to implement user experience design at your library.

If you want to lead the pack, you need to be planning for lots of different technologies, challenges, and issues. Our leading thinker and practitioner challenges you to think about building strategies and plans for both nearand long-term technology challenges and opportunities. In this interactive workshop, Tennant describes a variety of technologies (e.g., mobile computing, electronic books, data visualization, etc.), illustrates how they impact libraries, and supplies library examples where they exist. You’ll leave not only with some tools for planning for technological change, but also with a sense of where things are now and where we are headed.

Online tutorials can be extremely time-intensive to create. 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. 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 that are discussed. Show and tell the easy way!

This interactive and hands-on workshop provides a complete overview of mobile technologies, discusses the concept of the mobile revolution, and shares the potential applications to libraries. This tailored learning experience includes expert guest speakers presenting ideas originally shared at the online Handheld Librarian conferences. The workshop outlines the major mobile technologies available for libraries and exact methods for applying them with strategies for success. It focuses on interactive discussions enhanced by the mobile tools themselves and features immersive hands-on learning and playing to deliver specific take-aways that attendees can immediately apply to their libraries. Bring your laptop/notebook/mobile device/tablet!

HTML5 and CSS3 have been released and are changing the way web developers work with geolocation, native video, offline storage, semantic markup elements, canvas elements, drag and drop, opacity, gradients, and more. With wide support in mobile browsers and the latest browser releases from Google and Firefox, HTML5 and CSS3 are poised to be the new technologies to build the next version of the web. Clark, who builds digital library applications and sets digital content strategy, looks at some of the possibilities, trends, and enhancements that HTML5 and CSS3 enable, talks through specifics of implementation and how you can get started using HTML5 and CSS3 in your apps today, suggests ideas for library applications, and shares tips and techniques for using the full power of these new tools.

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. Meet Scott Nicholson, Author of Everyone Plays Games at the Library, get him to sign your book, and try out the games he is featuring!  Refreshments included.