These short “
pecha kucha-like” sessions will feature 5 Power Point presentations of 6 minutes and 40 seconds each. We will have time at the end of the session intended for Q&A for all presenters. Come for a lively, rapid-fire group of talks.
1. Technical Services: Off-Campus and Lovin' It! (Gail Julian)
Three years ago a major reorganization at Clemson University Libraries resulted in the merger of acquisitions, cataloging, government documents, and collection management into one Unit with five teams. But this meant that team members were not necessarily sitting in close proximity to each other. In fact, team members were spread out across the third floor, many in different offices. At the same time, space issues were being discussed in the main library. There was not enough seating for students with many sitting on the floor and in every nook and cranny. Non-library services had or were interested in moving into Library space to take advantage of the wealth of students studying there. The need for space and the belief that we were a backroom operation that didn't work directly with faculty and students led to the decision to move the Technical Services & Collection Management Unit off-campus to the Clemson Research Park where high-density storage, records management, and our digitization lab were already housed. This session will describe the feelings of both public service and technical service staff and faculty about the move, the planning and logistics of the move, the challenges and advantages of being off-site, and what the future holds. The aim of this session is to offer information and advice to any organization that is contemplating such a move.
2. A R(eally) F(un) P(rocess) - Surviving an RFP (Annette Day)
University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) Libraries has recently undertaken an RFP process to replace its current installation of Innovative’s Millennium ILS. This shotgun session will provide an overview of the process with the aim of sharing best practices and lessons learned. It is hoped that the information shared in this session will benefit other libraries as they plan and move forward with similar RFP projects.
3. Catching their attention. Using non-formal information sources to captivate and motivate undergraduates during library sessions. (Jacqueline Nash)
Students at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica are required to complete a course on research and writing for academic purposes. Students are scheduled to visit the library for a hands-on session in the library's computer laboratory. Some are eager to learn but others arrive late or seem distracted.How can the librarian as presenter engage these students? How can we motivate them to acquire the research skills required in academia? Sometimes we fail to motivate because we are not adapting our approach to incorporate aspects of users' life experiences. We must first capture their immediate attention and then encourage their academic curiosity. How can we stimulate them to become information detectives? We should not teach without stimulating their interest. What are the non-academic sources of information that have impacted the lives of Caribbean students prior to arrival at university? It wasn’t the journals or scholarly books. In the foreground it would have been high-school text-books, but in the background it was other, less-formal, sources of information. These include radio, television, music, newspapers, and websites and social media. Examples of these non-formal information sources will be presented using images. e.g. photographs. By using these non-formal sources as examples The audience may be asked for a show-of hand, in response. e.g. who has visited the English-speaking Caribbean? They may be asked to identify a Caribbean journal, or Nobel Prize winner. The audience can expect to gain information and insight of another, non-American society and culture.
4. Library Workflow Exchange: Because Your Library Already Answered the Question We Have (Robert Heaton)
As libraries and library departments reorganize around new systems, products, and staffing models, we often wonder how other libraries are handling the same processes. We can search the literature, but libraries do much more behind the scenes than that small cross-section of what is appropriate for publication, and relevant documentation of workflows is not consistently discoverable among other types of research. Library Workflow Exchange was created as an innovative and centralized repository of curated links to policies, processes, tutorials, and toolkits that document best practices or simply outline how things are done at other institutions. Since the project began in 2015, it has quickly grown to over 160 posts and has received 14,000 page views. In this session you will be introduced to the site and see how it can contribute to the workflow decisions you are making at your institution. Get straight to the work-process information that you need by searching Library Workflow Exchange and join us in building a community-driven resource by contributing the documentation that you have created.
5. The Noble Science of Naming Conventions (Michael Rodriguez)
Collections managers acquire a huge volume and variety of records over the years: email chains, title lists, usage data, policies and procedures, vendor communiques, price quotes, meeting minutes, documentation, and more. After a few years and staff changes, these records may come to resemble an "explosion in a shingle factory," as a critic once termed Pablo Picasso's first Cubist painting. How can collections managers and colleagues prevent chaos by standardizing and sustaining records management practices? Specifically, how can they implement helpful and consistent naming conventions? With the goal of motivating librarians to audit and clean up their data, this presentation will give humorous examples of good, bad, and ugly nomenclature and share tips on optimizing naming conventions in library departments' electronic and paper archives. Attendees will leave able and motivated to master the noble science of nomenclature, ensuring the discoverability of their internal data.
