As an innovation advocate, creative culture researcher and connector, Turner has worked inside the walls of Nike, Starbucks, and The Gap, as well as with companies such as Apple, IDEO and CEOs for Cities. Her focal point is in mapping strategic pictures of today’s changing world interjecting compelling solution-driven content and anecdotes of success. In today’s interactive online environment there are many opportunities to influence decision making, grab attention and add value. Learn about strategies that will work in library environments and have a positive impact on your community.

What would it look like if the stories of the communities that you serve were told by the members and residents of the community? How can a library provide support and leadership for bringing forward an online centerpiece that inspires community residents and workers to explore, share, and connect with what people express as meaningful about our communities? Columbus Metropolitan Library achieved this vision through valuable partnership with collaborator and sponsor WOSU Public Media. Columbus Metropolitan Library and WOSU Public Media developed and provide Columbus, Ohio, with a web portal at www.columbusneighbor hoods.org that encourages people to contribute images, share video, tell stories, and categorize this content by neighborhood areas. Columbus Metropolitan Library is pleased to present this project and the insights learned in an effort to connect friends, coworkers, customers, community contacts, and anyone who has interest in the change within the Columbus communities!

This session highlights the use of Twitter to enrich customer experience and engage them in further activities. Carr shares how Twitter informs the political community, how it is perceived by customers, and more.

Colorado libraries are facing shrinking budgets, failed elections, and three 2010 ballot initiatives that will slash public service funding by an additional 10-25% statewide. Dire times call for a big, hairy, audacious goal (or a “BHAG,” if you will). The BHAG Public Library Advocacy Initiative (bhagColorado.blogspot.com) seeks to spark conversation and awareness about the transformative power of public libraries while generating support for public library funding in every Colorado community. Learn how
the BHAGers recruited, trained, and deployed external library advocates (folks who love libraries but don’t collect a paycheck from the library) across 114 library systems. Their inspiration: OCLC’s “From Awareness to Funding.” Their tools: cloud computing, blogging, YouTube, social media, good old-fashioned storytelling, and pure audacity. Get some insights and ideas about ways to engage supporters within your community.

The mission of DOK is to become and remain the most advanced library  in the world. Hear how this visionary library partners and collaborates using imagination, creativity, technical innovation, and advancing scientific  understanding, to be an indispensable source of inspiration for its members, visitors, and partners in the city of Delft, in the Netherlands, and in the world.

Our popular speakers are back with new tools to make creating and managing your library’s web presence easier, including open source tools and cloud computing resources. Hop on board for a tour of some great new tools for measuring website use, and the impact of a library’s social media efforts, and more. Check out some of the amazing new data visualization tools to make your website content and reports pop. Speakers highlight tools for people who are just starting out with web publishing and populating social media profiles as well as some advanced applications for webmasters who like to dig their teeth into a bit of code.

Web 2.0 tools and services clearly have matured and are nearing ubiquity for most 21st-century computer users. They present technologies accompanied by an ever-increasing wave of information, leaving many of us overwhelmed. So, how can libraries add measurable value to what is consumed via the internet while enhancing lifelong learning and inspiring involvement in our new and fascinating “Age of Participation?” Mairn demonstrates interactively a variety of internet tools and services that can be incorporated anywhere online and/or in physical library spaces and highlights strategies to help provide more visibility to library resources. He discusses ways to help generate practical ideas for adding value, including creating useful Twitter backchannels to inspire participation before, during, and after a presentation; starting Google Waves to communicate and share ideas; having actual voice conversations with groups in social networks; sharing your desktop screen so that you can show off your library’s online tools over the internet; hosting live music concerts, gaming activities, and other library events; affixing QR (Quick Response) codes to book spines, ID badges, and doors to help guide mobile library users in your physical spaces to come visit your digital library space; and more.

Many libraries don’t have dedicated IT staff on site. We all get by as resident technology experts. This session is for those libraries struggling to provide innovative web and technology services with little resources to devote to staff, software, or hardware. The buzz about groundbreaking library technology can sometimes seem impossible to implement in smaller, poorer, and under-technology-staffed libraries. But we too can offer excellent online services to our users! Take advantage of the quick
and free services that any library can add to its website, mobile services, and public and staff computers with minimal time or expertise. This session covers up-to-the-moment easy steps that libraries can take to improve their websites with ease. If your library has no money for services, less staff time than you did last year, and still wants to have a substantial technology presence for your customers, then this is the session for you!

Librarians have been adding value to search, content management, and other information technology applications for a long time through the development and adaptation of traditional library classification schemas and/or taxonomies. In recent years, however, the development of text analytic software with its core capabilities of categorization, entity and fact extraction, and summarization has been opening up new and greater possibilities for enhancing a whole range of information applications. Hear about the tools available, their implications for libraries, and using the lessons learned from two recent projects. Reamy covers the range of issues and techniques that librarians need to learn if they are going to successfully adapt their traditional librarians’ skills to the new world of text analytics.

The first presentation describes the use of social media platforms to enforce effective change management and increase the use of information across the organization. Browne discusses how collaboration tools can improve employee productivity, what types of tools are best suited for different institutions, and shares examples from the ThinkFOOD! Information Café, which supports knowledge sharing and cross-business unit collaboration in her organization. When positioning the larger Qualcomm library within the organization, Bornheimer, our second speaker, focuses less on a laundry list of our content and services and more on how the groups and divisions within the organization are actually using the services. The wealth of new tech tools allows her to parse library usage data with more granularity and serve that same data back to clients in innovative ways. Hear about her efforts to use wikis, blogs, microblogging and other collaborative tools as vehicles for sharing data with clients, and how this has benefited libraries and their clientele.

Many corporate librarians use specialized clipping and alerting services to deliver value through a tangible, pragmatic information product. Daily information alerts that are tailored to individual requestors’ interests delight constituents on a daily basis, meeting their needs by playing an active, consistent role in their success. Affelt details how e-book readers such as the Amazon Kindle and the iPhone can help librarians quickly and easily look for, clip, and archive critical information, explore techniques for streamlining and organizing information through the use of these devices so that it can be delivered to requestors when and where it is needed and explains the process of integrating content from librarians’ e-book readers to requestors’ smartphones. Lee discusses going beyond media monitoring to provide insight and analysis. Zhu discusses discovery tools and processes used to put information into context.

Search engines offer a starting point for the initial phase of research and are an effective tool for both librarians and consumers. However, patrons often believe the search engine box is an information oracle and trust the “magical” blue links that appear as authoritative sources. This interviewstyle session discusses a wide variety of new search tools that are available to help patrons develop applicable critical thinking skills. Using realworld examples from their enterprise, speakers provide tips on how to best educate patrons to identify credible search results and dangerous pitfalls, ways to promote a “healthy skepticism” approach to web research, and the benefits to providing patrons with a set of search engine best practices.

The Smithsonian/NASA ADS is one of the pioneers of open access bibliographic databases. Operated under a NASA grant, it has grown from an indexing/abstracting database into a sophisticated, highly customizable digital library available worldwide. Since the advent of online editions of journals, abstracts are loaded into the ADS on or before the publication date of articles, with the full journal text available to subscribers. Older articles and microfilm have been scanned and made available. Speakers share their challenges, solutions, and lessons learned for others struggling with digital collections. LeBlanc discusses a departmental wiki and how it is evolving with other tools like blogs, discussion forums, and a video sharing tool. He shares tips and tricks on the adoption and training of these tools and others like Twitter and RSS. He highlights the library’s positioning as a key player in a organization who is implementing social media to become a more collaborative and knowledge sharing organization.

McMaster University Library was the first Canadian university library to receive the Association of College and Research Libraries’ Excellence in Academic Libraries Award in 2008. Achieving excellence and moving into the digital, collaborative environment has, and will continue, to demand significant changes in how library staff work with students, faculty, and each other. Jones has worked with a number of public libraries in dealing with the changes in how they are working with stakeholders and the community. Some of the “shifts” that libraries are making in how they are organized is seismic, but the organization charts of today and tomorrow must be significantly different than the organizational designs of yesterday. Hear top tips and strategies for making changes in academic and public library environments to organize and shift the focus to work demanded for tomorrow’s success.

Digital resources, whether they are licensed from publishers or generated locally, have many quirks. As these resources increase in library collections, librarians must adapt their workflows accordingly. Creech and McElroy address the staff training needs, and provide workflow tips and tools for licensed digital resources from the perspective of academic libraries working alone and as a part of purchasing consortia. Kemp discusses the same for locally created digital collections.

Crafting an effective library strategy isn’t just about the points in your plan. In the competitive environment of our institutions, you need to know what senior administrators value and expect in order to get your plans implemented. In this presentation, learn how senior administrators look at library issues and hear some strategies for making a compelling case.

Libraries are never short on innovation, especially when budgets are lean. How can staff stay on top of the latest library trends, and empower individuals to think “lean and mean” when times demand creativity? One solution, developed in Idaho during a summit on developing services for digital natives, was to create a Special Projects Library Action Team (SPLAT). SPLAT members act in the crow’s nest capacity of technological change. They search and share innovative ideas, leads on projects, and experiment
in social media statewide; vet ideas; and bring ideas back to the local level. Supported by the Idaho Commission for Libraries (ICFL), the group has a statewide focus, and members hold a wide range of perspectives and library experiences. Two SPLAT members present methods you can bring back to your communities to encourage collaboration, innovation, and creativity that will benefit your greater community.

We have always said that a picture is worth a thousand words, and when we can represent information with visual illustrations we immediately understand the context and absorb the ideas. The ability to transfer insights and knowledge more quickly certainly adds value to information professionals. Lawley discusses visualization tools and techniques that will definitely add value to your environment.