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 an extensive searching background will 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 Big Three.
• Desert Island Databases: What online resources would you consider essential if you were stranded on a desert island?
• Cost-Effective Searching: Online strategies/practices for tough times to get the most for your search dollar and your time.
• Searching the Social Web: Find out how to tap into the social web to glean intelligence.
• Searching the Mobile Web: Best apps and strategies.
• Subject Search Round-Up: Hear from experts on the specific tools and resources for searching in a variety of specialized topics

User expectations of what a good website is and does are higher than ever. Users expect high-quality information and services to be available to them whenever and wherever they are, be it via their desktop, mobile device, or via social media channels. Administrators are increasingly seeking both qualitative and quantitative data from libraries to justify expenditures and focus. How can library web managers satisfy all of these demands? This workshop explores ways to take your website to the next level, turning it from a menu that leads users into a disjointed set of content repositories and services to a unified service delivery platform which creates, deploys, and repurposes high-impact content and uses analytics to identify “friction points” on any website and in social media channels. Learn to deliver content and services to users beyond the library website through other channels such as mobile and social media. Get tips, techniques, and strategies to help create a seamless and “frictionless” web experience. Learn to create, deliver, and repurpose high-impact content. Know how to evaluate and measure the strengths and weaknesses of your website and social media and be prepared to positively face off with both users and stakeholders!

This full-day, intensive, hands-on workshop is for new and novice Drupal users. It covers Drupal 6 and 7 skills including installation, configuration, core functions, and theme development. This introductory workshop touches on most every aspect of the core Drupal framework:

• How to install Drupal and all the modules that a common site would use
• Adding, editing, and moderating content
• Creating user accounts and understanding Drupal’s permissions system
• Setting up menus and other design elements on a page
• Creating human-readable URLs
• Categorizing content using Drupal’s taxonomy system
• Editing your own Drupal theme Bring your laptop, and at the end of this Drupal day, you’ll have a simple but complete Drupal site.

This workshop discusses why listening to customers is so critical and then focuses in detail on who your customers are and segments them by use and reasons for use. It delves into the four categories of listening including solicited and structured methods (surveys, interviews, mystery shopping) as well as unsolicited and structured methods (complaints and compliments, suggestion/comment cards, comments and suggestions in surveys) as well as others. Joe Matthews uses examples from many different types of libraries to illustrate how using the “customer’s voice” improves service and to show how important it is to involve staff in listening to the customer.

This interactive workshop by experienced webcast and podcast producers covers the planning, running, and pre- and postproduction of webcasts and podcasts of NCompass Live. Based on the speakers' weekly NCompass Live episodes, the workshop illustrates how to broadcast live, record, and make available in both video and audio formats a program that can cover a variety of library topics ranging from children's services to services for the blind and visually impaired, to a monthly "Tech Talk" episode. Help the speakers build an episode of the show so you'll know how all the steps fit and how to build a program in your environment. Get all their tips and techniques as they share their secrets of success for the NCompass Live program. 

Continuous access to information is a near reality. Smartphone and mobile devices are the tools that make it all possible. Providing content to these tools and devices presents interesting design and development challenges. Lost connections, limited battery power, smaller screens, touch interfaces—these factors create a new way of thinking about web development and design. This workshop looks at trends in mobile interfaces, mobile sites versus mobile apps, emerging conventions for mobile design, best practices for mobile development, wizards, tools, and code templates for mobile site development. Come learn how to start creating mobile sites at your library and get a code walkthrough as well as a chance to build a sample web app.

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 for 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!

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 near- and long-term technology challenges and opportunities. In this interactive workshop, Roy 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.

With rapidly changing technology and workflows, increased and morphing user demands, economic stress, and widely varied staff skill sets, library managers in every department and every type of library find themselves in a quandary without excellent and specific change management skills. This interactive workshop invites you to focus on the four TIPS of technology and workflow change management: Technology, Infrastructure, Planning, and Skills. The workshop addresses planning for managing technology change projects, with guidance and real-world exercises in project planning, workflow assessment, project implementation, critical reflection, and staff skill development. Leave this workshop with specific tools and structures that apply to projects underway, or being planned for the future, at your own library.

With smartphones, the presentation of websites is expected to work more like one of the various mobile OS’s native applications. With the demand on library web developers to produce app-like mobile sites, there is often a rush to get a site up without considering the importance of streamlining or even restructuring the data driving the websites. Additionally, content maintenance is required of any web site regardless of platform, so it becomes advantageous to pull content from other systems to decrease redundancy. This workshop highlights case studies from two universities, examines how each one is structuring its data for multiple web-based platforms, and discusses how to work toward making data more flexible so that content is delivered from single source points rather than duplicated for the individual delivery platform. It provides participants with an opportunity to discuss their data challenges with the presenters and peers facing similar issues, and provides guidance on approaches as well as tips to building more efficient data delivery.

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. Speakers work through the basics of web programming and highlight resources to continue learning. Their emphasis is on mashups and web services as a means to practice these skills. Featured topics include REST and Structured Data (e.g., JSON); common programming routines and functions; building simple video widgets with the YouTube API; mapping data with Google Maps; and learning how JavaScript (jQuery) and PHP work together to create advanced search mashups with the WorldCat API. Note: Attendees should bring a laptop to play along with the examples and have some familiarity with HTML and a scripting language.

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!

Get ready for a practical and concrete session filled with tangible tips that you can take back to your library and use to implement technology projects successfully. Learn about the important process of planning, implementing, and managing IT projects in libraries. The theme: Technology should never drive any IT project. Rather, technology should be a solution to help meet a need at the library; technology should support library staff so the library can better serve its customers. From the beginning, a project is defined out of a need at the library, based on the library’s goals and plans—ideally a technology plan. From there, solutions are explored, one is chosen and implemented, partnerships can be formed, and library service is enhanced. This is not just another session to help library staff members understand technology in their library—this is designed to help library staff members find the right match for technology solutions to further the library’s goals.

Join our gamers and gadget lovers for an evening of fun and playing. Bring your latest games and gadgets and try out each other’s. 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, Amy Buckland, Royce Kitts, Erik Boekesteijn, and Jaap Van de Geer, this evening is filled with fun, networking, and, of course, learning and laughing. Refreshments included.