LibTechConf 2014: Lightning Talks

Lightning talks at LibTechConf 2014

Avoiding ʺAlma-geddonʺ: Strategies for Access Services

Course reserves

Millenium allowed link to reserve material
Potential problems: Alma would print everything, not sure if could link resolve e-reserve materials, duplicate course reserve records from data test load
had to shift how to think about it
deleted existing records, backed up data in another database
success: e-reserves server separate from Alama, just provided link when entering course records, started with clean data

Booking Study Rooms

Millenium was confusing and ugly
potential problems: launched later than expected, patrons have to choose specific room before booking time, needed improvement
solution: OpenRoom = open source booking system developed by Ball State University Libraries
patrons toggle between basic and expanded
my reservations section

Hilary Murphy, Amy Luedtke and Jane Boss, Hennepin County Library

way to connect children to technology and involve parents, getting them to sit with kids
hands-on, engaging, empowering
iPads in storytime: app advisory (guide caregivers, early literacy), 1/5 had tried sparingly, provide extras e.g. sounds
early literacy with iPad: presentations for caregivers, point of service app advisory

Elizabeth Kiscaden, Waldorf College

need current awareness service, because unaware of e-journals and unfamiliar with tools design to keep current
wanted to solve these problems
used aggregate feeds
feedstitch, feed blendr, feedbite, yahoo pipe, etc.
yahoo pipes features: sorting by date and others, regex, filter content by keywords
what do I do with this? but most faculty are unfamiliar with RSS feeds
use LibGuides as feed reader with proxy link added
things to look at: customization, increased awareness of e-journals?

Jennifer Nelson, and Gretel Stock-Kupperman, Viterbo University

migrated within 10 months
a lot of things had to be manually entered
rolled out features incrementally
users went from access to large set of results
figured out that students don’t know the different between book, article, journal, database
finding out that students wanted to stick to one box search
lower level: focus on search strategies
upper level: resource choices
renewed evaluation on source identification
faculty: made assignments too easy, assumed information scarcity
however, really liked what it did for them
moving from finding culture to evaluation culture

Nancy Marshall and Mary Kraljic, South Dakota State University

annually: 9k ILL requests, 2k cancelled
frequently requesting low quality resources
started notifying librarian of students that did that
identified users, phone interview (3-5 questions: revolving around ‘get it after cancelled?’), follow-up survey
reason for cancellation: 34% available in print, 23.8% cost, exhausted all sources 11.6%
preliminary data gather: 55 patrons, 86 requests analyzed
library owns: 45% obtained, 45% no, 10% unsure
doesn’t own: 27% used other sources, 4% purchased, 69% did nothing
9% obtained help from librarian
use of print collection: expand document delivery (only faculty right now), shelving redesign
consider charges, library instruction

Susan Schuyler, Jen Holman, and Kate Russell, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse

John Fink, McMaster University

Slides
“We’re library people” who talk about openness, sharing, but we’re still passing around Word docs
nothing is easier than ASCII
easy, portable, outlast us
HTML is okay, but hard to write and read
use markdown!
Use stackedit.io
works with everything