NJLA 2016 Conference Talks

Beyond the CE: Cultivating Your Personal Learning Network

We live in a constantly changing world, and this does not stop at the library doors. There are more continuing education opportunities than ever ranging from Conferences and Unconferences to web sites, blogs, podcasts and social media. Everyone's personal learning network takes a different form, and this panel representing public, school and academic libraries will explore the broad landscape of professional development opportunities for librarians.

Presenters:

• Joyce Valenza, Ph.D., Rutgers University
• Robin Rockman, Youth Services Librarian, Oradell Free Public Library
• Valerie Forrestal, Web Services Librarian, College of Staten Island
• Alyssa Valenti, Electronic Resources & Web Services Librarian, Raritan Valley Community College
• Theresa Agostinelli, Moderator

Slides: http://tinyurl.com/beyondCE

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The Cats Are Herding Us: Neko Atsume and Mobile Usability*


Neko Atsume, a popular mobile app for smart phones and tablets, was an international hit despite the fact that gameplay was originally directed entirely in Japanese. This presentation assesses the usability of this app using Jakob Nielsen's "5 Aspects of Usability," as well as research on interface design for low-literacy users, in order to point out techniques for designing user-friendly mobile applications.

*part of the NJLA Ignite: Ideas that Inspire program organized by Allen McGinley

Slides: http://bit.ly/NAandUX

Google Drive: Going Beyond Docs and Sheets

Tomorrow I'll be speaking at the 2015 Long Island Library Conference, in Melville, NY.

Here's they abstract for my talk, which is at 3pm in Salons 1, 2, & 3 (upstairs):

Google Drive is a free and easy way to create, share, and collaborate on documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. There are also simple tools for creating forms and surveys. Learn all the tips and tricks for getting the most out of Google Drive, including what you need to know about permissions and revisions, and how to add extra functionality to your spreadsheets and forms with Google Apps Script!


 
I'll be going over the basics of why and how you can use Google Drive, and then give some live examples of some tips and tricks, including crafting good form questions, analyzing form results, and, if time permits, some more advanced stuff like using functions in spreadsheets.

Some links and resources I'll be talking about include -

Google Drive "Hacks":

• About Optical Character Recognition in Google Drive
• Creating self-grading quizzes with Google Forms & Flubaroo
• Creating a Leaderboard using Google Docs
• Hacking Google Forms with Google App Script
• Google Spreadsheets Function List

Google Drive Encryption Tools:

• Boxcryptor
• Tresorit
• CloudFogger
• Viivo
• CryptSync

Google Drive and Privacy:

• Google Drive Terms of Service
• Google Drive Privacy Policy

I'll also be talking about Google Drive in my book, "Knowledge Management for Libraries" (Rowman & Littlefield) due out in August 2015, so look out for that! ;)

EDUCAUSE 2014

Brian Farr and I will be discussing our library website rebuild and the ins and outs of successfully using Wordpress as a CMS at this year's EDUCAUSE conference in Orlando, Florida. We'll be presenting at 2:30pm on Tuesday, in Meeting Room W311F-H. [Tuesday schedule]

Our talk, Building Academic Websites (in the Real World) will also be webcast, so if you'll be attending the virtual conference, you can catch us there too!



As usual, I'll include links to any of the resources we talk about, and try to keep the list updated as new topics or questions arise:

• List of Helpful WordPress Resources
• Tutorial for using scripts to add functionality to Google Forms

And, because animated gifs don't work in slideshare, here's the run-through of the evolution of the new site. Agile development FTW!

Google Drive for Libraries @ SLA-NY

I'll be speaking at the 2014 SLA NY Conference & Expo (9:15, Social Media track) on Thursday, 9/18/14, at Baruch's Vertical Campus in Manhattan, on the topic of Google Drive for libraries and information professionals. The hashtag is #slany if you'll be there and want to share your experience on Twitter.



Some links and resources I'll be talking about include -

Google Drive "Hacks":

• About Optical Character Recognition in Google Drive
• Creating self-grading quizzes with Google Forms & Flubaroo
• Creating a Leaderboard using Google Docs
• Hacking Google Forms with Google App Script

Google Drive Encryption Tools:

• Boxcryptor
• Tresorit
• CloudFogger
• Viivo
• CryptSync

Google Drive and Privacy:

• Google Drive Terms of Service
• Google Drive Privacy Policy

I'll also be talking about Google Drive in my book, "Library Knowledge Bases Made Easy", which will be published by Rowman & Littlefield some time in 2015, so look out for that! ;)

New Directions in Information Fluency Conference

I'll be presenting on 4/5/14 at the New Directions in Information Fluency conference at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. If you'll be attending, please consider attending my talk on collaborating with your school's writing center to provide workshops on writing research papers. It's during Concurrent Session III, at 2pm, and part of Panel D on Productive Collaborations (Olin 302).



This co-teaching experiment was actually from when I was still at Stevens, and all the lesson plans, handouts, and exercises were developed in conjunction with (and sometimes solely by) Jennifer McBryan, who is all kinds of awesome. I ended up leaving before we had a chance to get past anecdotal evidence of the program's success, so we never did get to most of the assessment methods mentioned in the presentation.

The most popular workshop we gave revolved around helping students understand the correct way to "use" scholarly sources. As in, how to develop a topic, how to read and understand an academic journal article, and how to responsibly use the content in their own papers. (Those links go to the handouts we used to teach each concept, via Google Docs. Feel free to download, adapt, and use them as you like.)

For the paraphrasing exercise, I would find 3 articles related to the course topic, or a sample research paper topic as outlined by the syllabus, and I'd send the first 2 pages of each of those articles to Jenn, who would then create a paraphrased excerpt from each one. (Here are the sample articles referred to in the above-linked exercise.) She would build some errors into each excerpt, either in the in-text citation, or in the way the writer is using the paraphrase or quote. (We were trying to get them to understand that you can't just pull words from an article, and use them out-of-context. You can't imply that the original author is saying something other than what they were actually trying to say, even if you can make the quote sound like it supports your thesis.)

I have to give all the credit to Jenn for being great at creating these problematic paraphrase excerpts. She was fabulous at making them challenging, but realistic, and I was pleasantly surprised by how adept the students were at catching even subtle misuse of information.

Finally, I've put together a brief reading list of articles discussing Library-Writing Center collaboration:

• Artman, Margaret, Erica Frisicaro-Pawlowski, and Robert Monge. "Not Just One Shot: Extending the Dialogue about Information Literacy in Composition Classes." Composition Studies 38.2 (2010).
• Bronshteyn, Karen, and Rita Baladad. "Perspectives on… Librarians as Writing Instructors: Using Paraphrasing Exercises to Teach Beginning Information Literacy Students." The Journal of Academic Librarianship 32.5 (2006): 533-536.
• Clark, Irene. "Information literacy and the writing center." Computers and Composition 12.2 (1995): 203-209.
• Ferer, Elise. "Working together: library and writing center collaboration." Reference Services Review 40.4 (2012): 543-557.
• Palomino, Norma Estela, and Paula Ferreira Gouveia. "Righting the academic paper: a collaboration between library services and the writing centre in a Canadian academic setting." New Library World 112.3/4 (2011): 131-140.

CUNY IT Conference - Building Academic Websites (in the Real World)

I'm presenting tomorrow at the 2013 CUNY IT Conference, where Brian Farr (our Systems Manager) and I will be talking about the process of developing our new library website. If you'll be at the conference, consider coming to see our talk at 2:15pm. [Conference schedule]

• Slides from our talk
• List of Helpful WordPress Resources
• Tutorial for using scripts to add functionality to Google Forms
• Slides from a similar talk I gave for ACRL-NY, which are more boring, but also more informational

I also have some fun slideshows of the site-building process, with screenshots and mockups and crazy marked up documents, which I'll add next week.

Zen and the art of the conference proposal

(This post originally appeared on Letters to a Young Librarian, and was edited by Jessica Olin.)

Your first year as tenure-track faculty is an odd one. You’re not expected to publish right away, but it’s encouraged that you keep your CV active by adding to it in one way or another. Given the amount of time you spend acclimating to a new workplace during your first year (anywhere, not just in academia), you don’t necessarily have the time or the connections to do anything major. Often you’re expected to spend that first year choosing future research projects, and starting to design your research studies and maybe collect some data if you’re lucky. Sometimes, if you’re like me, you were hired to work on a specific project, and will spend much of your time tackling minor practicalities like building a website from scratch and migrating the entire former site’s content to it. Pish posh.

This forces you to be a bit creative with adding lines to your CV. I’ve looked for limited time and energy-commitment obligations, like less formal writing projects and talks at local chapter meetings. One opportunity I stumbled across on one of the CFP blogs I follow was a call for conference proposal reviewers. I’ve acted as a peer reviewer in the past, so it seemed like a good opportunity for some professional service.

About halfway through the 20-or-so proposals assigned to me for review, I realized that this was much more than just a line on my CV. I’ve submitted many conference proposals in the past (a handful of which were actually accepted,) but being on the other side of the submission process gave me some useful insights for the future. (For the record, the conference was not library-focused, and it was a blind review process, so I feel ok about talking about it publicly.)

First, I shouldn’t have to say this, but based on many of the submissions I reviewed it warrants a mention: Follow. The. Instructions. You’ll read this advice a lot in posts about applying for jobs, but it goes for pretty much any official process in the professional world. Sometimes you think can skip steps. Maybe you know someone. Maybe you’re a big name in the field. Maybe you presented last year. Well, I can’t see your name and I wasn’t at last year’s conference, so do us all a favor and complete all the fields in the form. If I don’t need a certain piece of information I’ll skim over it. Better safe than sorry.

Here’s another piece of advice that comes directly from job application best practices: customize, customize, customize. Maybe you’re submitting a similar proposal to several similar conferences. I don’t care. Take the time to tweak your proposal to at least touch upon this specific conference’s mission and theme. I know you have to put out a lot of proposals just to get a few acceptances, but try to make it feel like this conference is one you actually *want* to present at.

GradHacker recently did a post on Killer Conference Proposals, and while all their tips are good ones, I think their final tip is of particular importance: “Explicitly state an audience takeaway.” Of course *you* find your research interesting and relevant (or at least I hope so). But take a step back and think like a marketer. What are you offering presentation/panel attendees? So many proposals I reviewed talked exclusively about their own experience without in any way addressing why that experience should matter to anyone else. Is the technology you used attainably-priced? Are your assessment standards widely accepted? What kind of implementation time/resources did it take? I’ve sat through many presentations where the project discussed was fabulous, but I came away frustrated because the presenters made no effort to tell me how I could replicate all or part of it, or apply the knowledge elsewhere. Give me something I can use, or reserve this talk for a showcase or project update event.

My last piece of advice doesn’t really apply to a blind review, but I’ll mention it anyway. When I’m participating in an event, I make sure to publicize it throughout my own networks. I like to think this gives a person a reputation as someone who will actively work to help draw in attendees, and thus be an asset to future events.

If anyone else has been part of the conference proposal review process, please leave some tips in the comments! What causes you to reject a proposal outright? What puts a presenter on your good side right away?

oneSearch bookmarklet @ LibTech 2011

On March 17th (this Thursday,) I'll be presenting at the Library Technology Conference on the oneSearch bookmarklet tool created by Barbara Arnett and I.

Barbara won't be able to make it out to Minnesota (she'll be presenting the bookmarklet to the NJLA 2011 Technology Innovation Award committee,) but because we want to be as practical as possible in our presentations, she put together a quick reference for the three parts of the bookmarklet (you don't actually need the third piece, it just creates a nice button for users to drag and drop into their browser, as opposed to a simple link.)

Below is the code you'd need to get started working on your own browser-based search bookmarklet:


(1)HTML, (2)Javascript & (3)CSS:


1 - HTML to display bookmarlet on your webpage:

(edit this line: {document.body.appendChild(document.createElement('script')).src='http://www.stevens.edu/library/js/search.js';}
so that the red text links to the JavaScript file you place on your server)


2 - Javascript to sit on your server (sits in search.js, referenced in bookmarklet HTML)

(edit this line: _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXXX-1']);
so that the red text reflects your own Google Analytics account number (you can also find this complete code within GA, in actions->edit->check status,)
and this line: var searchString='http://ezproxy.stevens.edu/form?qurl=http://XXXXXXXX.cs....&field=title&term='+(Ti);
so that the red text reflects your own search URL, which you can get from your catalog, database or federated search vendor)

(Note: if you don't want to use Google Analytics, just remove all the code before the line: var Ti=document.title.replace('- Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia','');)


3 - CSS needed for the button:

(You can do this as inline CSS or a separate stylesheet. Just replace the background image with your own image file.)

-------------------------------------------------------------
***OR, if you'd rather just download all the files, edit them, and place move them to the appropriate locations on your server, you can download the file packet (with instructions in a ReadMe.txt file.)***
-------------------------------------------------------------

Presentation slides:

Bridging the gap from Wikipedia to scholarly sources: a simple discovery solution

One note: when we developed the bookmarklet, we were beta-testing Ebsco Discovery Service. We have since switched to Serial Solutions' Summon, but while that's being configured, the bookmarklet used our integrated search (also a Serial Solutions product.)

On the down-side, this has caused some inconsistency in our screenshots (the slides feature EDS screenshots, since we don't have full access to Summon yet.) However, this does emphasize the importance of having the full code reside on your server, as we've been able to make the required adjustments to the code without users having to re-install the tool.

Twitter for Libraries preso follow-up

Ok, I haven't listened to the recording yet (and am dreading it), but I have to say that presenting strictly in an online format at yesterday's Handheld Librarian conference definitely threw me off a little, so I'm sorry if I sounded super nervous (it always makes me uncomfortable when a presenter sounds nervous.) Anyway, I underestimated how much I rely on reading people's expressions to direct my talks (bored, confused, nodding in agreement...), and the radio silence (and relative chat silence) kind of left me flailing a bit. Because of that, I feel like there were some questions/issues I didn't fully address, so I just wanted to do a follow-up post to clarify and expand on some of those issues.

First of all, in case you missed it (it's ok if you were in Joe Murphy's SMS talk, he's teh awsum), here are the slides: http://www.slideshare.net/val_forrestal/twitter-for-libraries-handheld-librarian-709

One of the biggest concerns people had was: What should libraries be tweeting about? I tried to express that that really depends on your audience, and you have to cater to what you think they will find interesting/helpful/informative, but I understand that getting started can seem a little overwhelming, so here are some good posts that talk about how precisely libraries can use Twitter:

• http://www.kellyd.com/2009/07/29/how-your-library-may-not-be-using-twitter-but-should/
• http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2009/01/using-twitter-in-libraries.html
• http://andyburkhardt.com/2009/07/27/six-things-libraries-should-tweet/

Those pretty much cover the spectrum of what tweet from our library account (@scwLibrary). After the conference I was kicking myself for not just going to our page so I could show everyone what we tweet about (and that page is less controversial than my own Twitter feed, which I felt really guilty about showing everyone because of privacy issues for the people I follow - because some of their feeds are private/protected, and so I had to just show it super fast and then leave the page, which was probably dizzying for everyone, kind of like this sentence.)

Another thing that came up was finding the "correct" hashtag for a topic or event. I still maintain that the best way to do this is to a.) try searching some possible hashtags by guessing and seeing which is the most popular; or b.) just ask the twittersphere (ex. "hey does anyone know the official hashtag for the Handheld Librarian conference today?"). Your followers or people searching for the same event/topic by name will usually let you know the answer. However, there are places where you can "register" a hashtag, and it's possible that people do use these as hashtag directories, even if they are not widely adopted right now, so I'll mention a few:

• http://hashtags.org/
• http://tagal.us/
• http://www.hashdictionary.com/
  

(For some really good info on the history and usefulness of hashtags, see here.)

Speaking of hashtags, another thing I completely forgot to mention: there's a fairly new hashtag going around for recommending librarians to follow. This is an off-shoot of a popular trend called "follow friday", where people recommend their favorite people to follow every Friday. Anyway, if you're looking for librarians to follow to get you started, do a Twitter search for #followalibrarian (or just click on the handy link I made for you there, heh...)

Someone also asked for examples of how people are using Twitter in educational/classroom settings. I think this post has some great advice/links for how instructors can use the medium: http://www.bestcollegesonline.com/blog/2009/07/21/100-serious-twitter-tips-for-academics/

You can also follow KSU professor Michael Wesch's blog, Digital Ethnography (he often experiments with using social media in his classes), or @itsanno on Twitter (she mentioned recently that she will be using Twitter with the students in one of her upcoming classes.)

Ok, so this is a long post, so I'll wrap it up now. I think at some point I will do a follow-up to this follow-up, with some tips for more advanced users. With 200 people in a presentation, it's really hard to know how much time to spend on the basics (as I'm sure there were some beginners there) and the advanced tips (for you "power users"). Some future topics I'd like to cover:

• Twitter integration w/blogs, Facebook, websites, etc.
• Mashups (using social media aggregation sites like FriendFeed or Netvibes)
• Twitter mobile apps (which I really wish I had covered, seeing as this was a conference about mobile technology!)
• Twitter for reference

Is there anything I missed? Any lingering questions/comments/doubts? Let me know here in the comments, or on Twitter (@val_forrestal).