Sessions

The Information Services Department at Texas Tech University had been providing reference, library instruction and collection development responsibilities according to traditional librarianship. Four years ago, Laura Heinz, new department head, listened to the frustrations and concerns of the librarians as they struggled to meet the needs of their subject areas. Connecting the Library’s mission statement’s focus on “providing individualized service” and the librarians’ need to have time to better meet the needs of their department faculty and staff, Heinz removed librarians from the Reference Desk and encouraged librarians to become more engaged in their subject areas and to explore creative and innovative ways to meet the needs of their users. The concept of ""Personal Librarian"" was created and promoted. This precipitated a structural change on the main floor of the Library as two new service points were created to offer library users assistance by trained classified staff and student assistants regardless of the entrance they use to enter the building. One librarian was assigned responsibilities as a ‘triage librarian’. This librarian’s primary responsibilities were to be the in-house librarian referring subject specific questions to the appropriate librarian. Managing change, overcoming resistance and a shift in culture were important to the success of the new structure. While this shift was uncomfortable for some, most embraced the change recognizing the opportunities within the new structure. Librarians worked to meet the needs of their academic areas; some held office hours in the academic departments; some collaborated with faculty to develop subject specific instruction for individual courses. Recently, the department’s name was changed to Research, Instruction & Outreach to better reflect the evolution of the department.

Carrye Syma, Associate Librarian, seized the opportunity to customize her service to her subject areas. With the removal of the Reference Desk and thus the elimination of desk hours, Syma found that she had more opportunities to schedule database demonstrations, tours and work more closely with departmental faculty. Demonstrations could be offered in the Library or in the department or college requesting the service. In many cases, it was possible to receive a request and within a week offer the demonstration. With the exception of regular departmental, Library wide, or campus wide meetings, Syma was available in her office for walk in appointments. Students needing assistance are now able to walk in to the library and in many cases, meet with the librarian for their area immediately. Syma has been able to go over to her subject area buildings and meet with faculty in an impromptu and casual manner thus creating a nice working relationship. The removal of the Reference Desk responsibilities presented personal time management challenges but also allowed for more time to be spent collaborating with colleagues on various projects.

Students are often not academically ready for the traditional peer-reviewed articles required for their research assignments; the articles are sometimes beyond their understanding and out of scope for what they need. The complexity of many scholarly articles frequently makes them unapproachable for undergraduate students, at least as an entry point into academic discussions. Meanwhile, threads of scholarly conversations can be observed in online news sources, blogs, and Twitter, formats that are more familiar to today’s students than the popular, trade, and scholarly article distinctions librarians often present. The session will demonstrate an instructional approach that focuses on the content of discussions within expert blogs, and encourages students to think critically about the authors, their arguments, and how conclusions are supported.

This presentation will model an instructional learning activity in which students, played by audience members, will be prompted to work in small groups to answer some key critical-thinking questions about a sample blog. The audience will be provided with examples of blogs both in print (handouts) and online (PowerPoint and online). Discussion of instructional design will be included, and audience members will be encouraged to share their own ideas and experiences with similar activities.

In 2012, a small private university library experienced an over 40% increase in patron-based interlibrary loan requests, as well as an overall upswing in both lending and borrowing. Statistical analysis revealed that the rise was a direct result of a systemic overhaul of reference services and information literacy instruction, and indirectly related to adjustments in collection development policy.

The surge in demand for resources led the ILL department to examine interlibrary loan processes as current practices were inadequate to meet demand. Where could the department streamline to be more efficient and what technologies would be needed? The department, aware that any improvements would have to be low-cost or no-cost solutions in order to keep within budget, actively looked for creative options to handle the workload and still maintain quality control.

This presentation offers how one small academic library evaluated ILL practices in the library community and then discovered, assessed and adapted an alternative web-based system for its resource sharing management. We will also address any new developments that have occurred since the adoption of the new system and share patron feedback related to the changes implemented.

In August 2011, Galadriel Chilton accepted a new position as the Electronic Resources Management Librarian at the University of Connecticut (UConn). Like many academic institutions, over half of UConn's collections budget is spent on continuing subscription fees for e-journals, aggregate databases, as well as one time e-purchases with or without annual access fees.

Like an amusement park’s thrilling rides and bright lights, e-resources are a big attraction at academic libraries. However, like a Ferris wheel or Tilt-A-Whirl, e-resources are short-term, expensive engagements with plenty of ups and downs on the rousing ride to information access.

In an effort to not only survive, but thrive in the e-resource management amusement park, Galadriel uses the instructional design model ADDIE to analyze, design, develop and evaluate the e-resource collection and the organization in order to implement a sane, effective, user-centered, and evidence-based practice of managing the University of Connecticut’s electronic resources.

This presentation outlines Galadriel’s approach and reviews the results of the project’s first year:

• Acting on an analysis of the organization to streamline e-resource communication and information distribution,
• Implementing a review and renewal plan, and
• Implementing a customized version of ERMes to facilitate budget and expenditure reports.

Galadriel will conclude this presentation with the pros and cons of using ADDIE so far, future plans, and time for questions and discussion.

As a library you have awesome services, unique collections and great staff. Do the majority of students, faculty and administrators know about existing services or new library initiatives and how helpful your staff is? Is there a graphic/image campus members immediately identify as the Library? What is the library synonymous with on campus? What do you WANT the library to be known for on campus? Often librarians do a really good job developing creative services and collections, but do little to brand, market and promote the library. In the competitive budget environment found on most college and university campuses it is vital libraries let students and administrators know about all the valuable resources and services available in the physical and virtual library.

This session will provide practical advice for developing a library brand, including how to conceive a library identity and create attractive, engaging visual graphics useful in branding all things library-related. In addition, we will highlight successful promotion and marketing campaigns, like online contests, free ebook give-aways, use of common social networking platforms, emerging platforms like Pinterest and Google+, QR codes and mobile initiatives successfully used at University of Nebraska Omaha to make Criss Library synonymous with innovation, engagement and technology.

Learn about an easy and inexpensive way to improve service at your desks and help staff better help students. Gimlet, an online desk statistics tracker and knowledge base enables you to ‘staff your desk wisely’. Johnson County Community College’s Billington Library implemented this service in the summer of 2011. Librarians from JCCC will discuss how it has helped them better staff their desks, track issues and student assignments, and improve training.

At its core, Gimlet (gimlet.us) is a secure, customizable web service that allows library staff to record both the content and category of questions. Logged questions and answers produce both a large, searchable knowledge base and a valuable quantitative database. Using the knowledge base function, library staff can quickly search the question archives to see how a question has been answered in the past. Library directors can export data to produce valuable reports organized with eight optional facets including patron type, question type, duration, automatic time-stamp, and library staff member. Better still, the service is dirt cheap ($10 a month after a free trial) and requires almost no training.

One of the hallmarks of staying relevant is meeting the users where they are. Twitter, a 140 character micro-blogging tool, allows libraries to connect with faculty and students in a medium where they naturally spend time.

In 2009, staff at the Washington University in St. Louis Libraries created a Twitter team and started an account. During the past three years, the team has used Twitter as an outreach tool to promote library resources and campus events, answer reference questions, and take suggestions from patrons. The Washington University Libraries’ Twitter team has eight members and the responsibility for running the account is spread across the team. The Libraries’ Twitter account has steadily gained followers in the Washington University community as a result of follower drives and trivia contests.

The team has also demonstrated that social media can be used as a tool for outreach. In the Fall 2011 semester, two members of the team partnered with an Art History professor and embedded themselves into one of her courses. Additionally, the Twitter team has developed a series of classes for the Washington University community. These classes range from a hands-on class for beginners to a series of classes about practical uses for Twitter like professional development. In 2012, the Team partnered with the University’s Office of Alumni and Development to host a Tweet-up, or in-person gathering of Twitter users.

This session addresses all aspects of the logistics of running the Libraries’ Twitter account. From coming up with topics to tweet about to gaining new followers to promoting campus events with hashtags, the presenter will give you concrete advice on establishing and sustaining a Twitter presence for your library.

Today’s academic libraries face the challenge of changing collections, standards, services, spaces, and user needs. Burke (2011) posits that there are two kinds of organizational change – evolutionary and revolutionary. In a rare coincidence of theory and reality, current academic libraries face both breeds of change at once. This presentation outlines the major forces for change and the directions in which they push libraries, and offers specific examples of how strategically managing these changes has impacted recent decisions on hiring and organizational restructuring at one academic library. Finally, this presentation addresses developing best practices in organizational change and effectiveness to help administrators and mid-level library managers not just cope with tumultuous change, but to create an organizational strategy to harness strengths, address weaknesses, and garner participation throughout the library.

[Cited: Burke, W. W. (2011). Organization change: Theory and practice. (3rd ed.) Los Angeles: Sage Publications.]

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Trainers do it all the time – record athletes as they practice and compete in order to improve performance through self-observation, coaching, and observing the performance of other athletes. Why not incorporate this model into classroom instruction? This is exactly what happened when a Librarian volunteered for a video observation project created by a Dean for faculty members. As the Dean developed a new understanding of the challenges inherent in one-shot instruction, the Librarian improved learning outcomes in instructional sessions. In this session the team will discuss how they collaborated and what they learned.

Teaching is often a closed process. We do our best, make connections with other instructors, and try to keep current with best practices. The Video Observation Project was created to make the teaching process more transparent. After classes were recorded links were embedded in a course shell where instructors could watch their own teaching and watch their colleagues in action. From a Librarian’s perspective, this was a great opportunity not only for professional development, but also to have the Dean observe the unique challenges of dropping in to someone else’s classroom for an hour.

After the taping both the Librarian and the Dean filled out assessment forms and they met to review their findings. They worked together, observing and discussing best practices from the video library, to craft some solutions to the challenges of one shot instruction. As a result, the Librarian began redesigning her workshops. She moved from a reliance on technology (clickers) to an activity based learning environment. She also created a more student focused classroom and incorporated assessment into the mix. In this workshop the team will discuss their processes and video clips will be used to illustrate outcomes.

Rather than trying to guess which books patrons will want to use, librarians are experimenting with patron-driven acquisitions – loading bibliographic records for e-books into the catalog and only paying when a patron clicks through to the text. The goal is to avoid purchasing books that never get used and to purchase only those books that most closely match user needs. While many PDA projects limit the number of records loaded by using an approval profile, UMKC decided to work with their book vendor YBP and with e-book aggregator EBL to load as many records as possible into the catalog, thus allowing the patron the widest choice in selecting books for purchase or for short-term loans. The project was started in Spring of 2011, and this presentation will offer a preliminary analysis of spending and usage patterns, as well as information about how to set up patron-driven acquisitions in your own library.

As information resources continue to move to digital formats, it is important to investigate acquisitions options and workflows related to the purchase and access of content. Both students and faculty of academic institutions have readily accepted the transition of videos from physical disk to streaming media and academic libraries are responding to this shift. Recently, publishers and content vendors have introduced a flood of streaming videos to the market and each vendor seems to have a unique way of providing their content to libraries.

This presentation will examine the vendors that have entered the streaming video market and are of interest to academic libraries, and explore streaming video acquisitions models and workflows when working with those vendors. The related consequences to other areas of technical services will be touched on briefly including licensing and distance education implications as well as cataloging and tracking the usage of streaming videos. The approach that the University of Nebraska at Omaha has taken to acquire streaming videos will be explained.

The DeLaMare Library was the "beautiful library", with impeccable collections, located in a historic building at the crossroads of the departments it serves on the university campus, and had undergone a complete retrofit and remodel in 1997; yet 12 years later, students were only occasionally seen browsing its collections, with faculty only dropping by to put materials on course reserve. This paper is a case study of how the library, after in-depth analysis of holdings and close observation of end-user patterns, made seemingly radical changes that have resulted in an over five-fold increase in gate count in less than two years; rather than a quiet repository of books, the library has become a hotbed of learning and knowledge creation, with students and faculty driving the need to more than double the number of computer workstations and library open hours. Details shared will include numerous low to no-cost ideas that have proven effective in front-line advocacy for the Science & Engineering Library, and enabled the library to meet the increased demand without corresponding increases in library staff.

In Fall of 2009, Ex Libris set out to learn what libraries needed from technology to maximize their institutional value. After collaborating for three years with development partners such as Princeton University Libraries and Purdue University Libraries, Ex Libris released the Unified Resource Management system Alma to the marketplace. Inspired by the unprecedented opportunities made available through Alma’s unification of all of the library’s resources, Fort Hays State and Midwestern State Libraries made the decision to unify their library’s workflows by eventually replacing their ILS, ERM and digital asset management tools with Alma and became participants in the Early Adopter group.

This major industry development was released at a time when serials expenditures began to demand disproportionate amounts of the budget, and offers libraries an opportunity to cut costs through immediate efficiencies including cloud hosting and workflow management. Alma provides fingertip access to e-resource usage statistics by utilizing business intelligence engines inside of the staff workflow.

Join our staff from Fort Hays State University and Midwestern State University for a discussion about the timeliness of this transition, key issues driving our evaluation, opportunities to cut costs and increase efficiencies, and reactions from our colleagues. The presenters will also speak about the impact technology can have on the future of the library, practical insights on how to prepare for change, and how to evaluate today’s workflows in the context of unified resource management.

The new Standards for Libraries in Higher Education approved by the ACRL Board of Directors, October 2011, tasks academic libraries to demonstrate their value and effectiveness with an accompanying foundation of data and performance indicators. Additionally, trends in accreditation processes include using assessment results.

Unfortunately, library statistics are frequently scattered amid different departments, personnel, and formats, making data difficult to find and assemble into reports. The existence of a dashboard gives libraries a simple means of compiling the important data necessary to demonstrate their value.

The concept of a dashboard is not new. Like a car's dashboard, a software dashboard provides decision makers with the information necessary to ""drive"" the business. Business Intelligence has been using this system for years and has perfected the design. Hoping to discover an affordable software product adaptable for the library, we found numerous choices of software for real time and comprehensive reports; unfortunately these proved too expensive for libraries that have experienced funding cuts or were incompatible with the myriad of library programs used. Determined to find a suitable and economic answer, we decided to design our own.

Dashboard design typically consists of bar charts, pie charts and line graphs. This visual presentation of performance measures provides users a “snapshot” of the whole library organization instantly by capturing and reporting specific data points from each department. This also provides users with the ability to generate detailed reports and saves time and frustration as compared to searching in numerous areas for key information and running multiple reports.

With this in mind we turned to Google Sites in conjunction with Google Docs. We were pleased to discover this combination provided a simple, scalable, and flexible solution. Librarians can access the dashboard “in the field” for presentations, back up or integrate Google Docs with Excel spreadsheets, and control the accessibility level of each document and page.

What follows is a detailed account of our process, which will give you a “snapshot” of your library and the ability to create reports in a “dash”.

Over the past three years, the librarians at Central Methodist University have embarked on a mission to increase both usage and information literacy skills amongst the undergraduate student population at the brick and mortar library. Usage of electronic resources continued to grow, but the library space was underutilized. After completing surveys and focus groups with students, the library faculty focused their attention on programming to build skills and awareness of the library’s collections and services. “Big Game” events, focusing on ghost stories, zombies, and steam punk, have been held the past three years to test library skills in a competition setting. Likewise, working with the English Department, research assignments were crafted to reflect student interests in pop culture topics, without losing the research components so important to building information literacy skills. As these activities have changed the culture of the Central Methodist library, circulation and traffic have steadily risen, and information literacy skills have improved. This session will give practical examples, assignments, and assessment techniques, as well as tips on holding your own zombie war.

A small university library in the Midwest traveled on a journey of rediscovery this past year focusing on what it means to provide reference and instruction services with surprising and dramatic results. The Public Services Department revamped its reference area, changed its service desk, instruction program, and website, increased social media usage, added QR codes, text a call number service feature, and a chat widget to its library catalog as well as multiple locations on its website. The changes resulted in a doubling of reference transactions and the reference department became more vitalized and energized as a hub of student activity in the library. Instruction requests have increased and online chats with students have become the norm. An assessment of current and past decisions and statistics will be shared, specific staff training changes implemented will be highlighted, communication strategies for reference staff using technology will be offered, and insights into how to increase reference interactions will be discussed during the session. The journey to a better reference and instruction program was undertaken and the results were successful, but the voyage continues with new technology, new resources, new questions, and new students all over in 2013!

The fast-growing e-book collections in libraries and the quality of metadata from various e-book vendors present challenges for how libraries deliver comprehensive e-book management and access. Online public access catalogs (OPAC) and web-scale discovery systems are two major channels of locating e-books in library collections. This session will focus on the quality issue of e-book metadata and solutions for improving the quality of metadata as well as the impact of discovery tools on e-book access.

This presentation will explore the practice of adding e-book metadata into the library online catalogs to provide direct access. Enhancing and maintaining library e-book metadata in an ILS is essential to enable precision in terms of discovery. Bad DOI links, duplicated records, issues of quality e-book MARC records from vendors? Sound familiar? This session will discuss the challenges that have evolved in batch processing e-book metadata at a mid-size academic library, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. The workflow for the batch process using the free software, MarcEdit, and maintenance in the Innovative Millennium Integrated library system will be illustrated. This session covers tips, tricks and lessons for the batch loading e-book MARC records: enhancing records using tools that are available for batch loading; customizing load tables; using functions provided by Innovative Millennium to clean up records, etc. I will share various strategies on solving different issues of e-book metadata. Detailed screen shots and step by step workflow will be shown.

It is arguable that the OPAC is the best interface for e-books. It is still too early to declare that the management of e-book metadata will move away from the ILS and into web-scale discovery systems. What tool is better for e-book discovery, the OPAC or web-scale discovery system? How does the discovery system impact e-book access? Based on our experience of implementing the discovery system, Summon, I will discuss the challenges of Summon in locating e-books and how we adjust workflow of batch processing e-books.

This presentation will show how Indiana State University’s library readers have benefitted from the collaborative efforts of the Reference and Technical Services departments. Cooperation between the two departments has resulted in faster access to a heavily used collection of the latest fiction and nonfiction browsing materials and a more efficient, productive workflow process in Technical Services. ISU Library’s popular browsing collection is a big driver for circulation statistics. When a decision was made to initiate a contract with a vendor to begin leasing a browsing collection of the latest fiction and nonfiction titles--beginning with books and moving to other formats--the decision was largely due to staff cuts and a shrinking budget which made it almost impossible for the Reference and Technical Services departments to keep doing business as usual. In only one year, Technical Services staff was reduced by ten, including a rapid copy cataloger, a library assistant in charge of receiving and rapid cataloging, and the library assistant in charge of book processing. The Reference Instruction faculty was affected by resignations and sabbaticals that drastically reduced time that had previously been available for selecting popular fiction and nonfiction titles for the browsing collection. The browsing materials allotment was reduced in accordance with the library’s shrinking budget, which resulted in fewer titles being ordered. From selection to acquisitions to processing, the workflow had to be streamlined yet still maintain a focus on what was best for library users. The solution, explained in this presentation, results from the collaboration between Reference and Technical Services. Reference subject liaisons, who also perform collection development duties, are an important part of the plan. The new workflow ensures that library users receive timely access to the Browsing Collection’s latest acquisitions. The result is an academic library’s success story.

The presentation features a process for interaction and collaborative engagement with faculty in order to foster student learning in an academic environment. Regardless of one’s personality type, any librarian can utilize some of the features showcased in this presentation. One only need be authentic and demonstrate enthusiasm for collaboration. The session includes video clips of professors describing how they work with the presenter to assist their students. The professors share in their own words what encouraged them to collaborate with the librarian on projects that enhanced their curriculum and course management system site. The clips also discuss partnering with the librarian about locating and analyzing substantive, relevant resources in class and by appointment, in addition to creating citation clinics for avoiding unintentional plagiarism.

The process includes demonstrating a willingness to provide assistance through coffee shop pedagogy sessions, department walk-throughs, newsletters, e-mails, presentations, interaction and “a presence” in department, college and university-wide meetings, showing an interest in course assignments and/or syllabi, working with course management systems and instructional designers, learning about faculty research interests, working with collection development liaisons, and determining special needs such as accurately citing sources and preventing plagiarism.

“Books are for use,” “Every person his or her book,” and “Every book its reader.” These seemingly simple principles of librarianship were among those developed by S. R. Ranganathan in 1931 and still serve us today. Even at a time when new technologies have the ability to make intellectual content even more accessible to readers, bibliographers are faced with decreasing selection budgets. How do we make wise selection choices? Do we purchase paper or electronic books or more precisely, when do we choose to purchase paper books and when do we purchase electronic books? Librarians at a Midwestern public university sought guidance from its patrons. A survey was conducted to examine the relative preferences for books in paper and in electronic forms. Characteristics of readers and their purposes for accessing books were explored as were the characteristics of the two formats such as accessibility, portability, and convenience.

In an age where students are expected to demonstrate their familiarity with a topic through assessments other than a term paper, Information Literacy becomes more than learning traditional library skills. Library instruction typically involves showing students how to find peer reviewed articles for an academic paper. However, students are writing fewer papers and demonstrating their competence through their use of a growing array of social media; including discussion boards, mashups, and Skype. Acceptable sources have moved from merely published peer-reviewed scholarly documents to the new primary documents of blogs, tweets and even Facebook as well as a growing number of creative commons publications and digital archives. In addition, the granularity of these info-bits make it increasingly difficult for students to find a context within which to draw the pieces together, and their false sense of expertise further complicates relearning inadequate search strategies. Consequently, students are entering a seemingly familiar environment that works far differently from their expectations.

Students rehearsed the routine of typing a few words into a search field and pressing enter thousands of times before arriving at college; but thinking about how they choose the terms they use, how items they find may be related to their topic, which are results are credible, or which database to use become novel experiences. Even when guided to specifically academic databases, gathering three sources for many becomes a scavenger hunt rather than a search for items with related content. Focusing on the question at hand provides the path through which each of these obstacles can be overcome.

Solutions to appropriately integrating the wider range of sources available on the web begin with the recognition that there is a breadth of appropriate information available through the web. In order to access this content, students need to accurately describe what they need, recognize how individual sources fit together, and learn to choose the most appropriate source rather than the first one they encounter. A few examples illustrate this point: When contributing to a discussion board or writing a reflective journal, use of a blog from 9/11 survivors provides a valuable primary source. Tweets sent during the Arab spring illustrate the sense of chaos participants experienced. When Skyping, students need to find credible information in a timely fashion to support their opinions. Incorporating first hand observations

Pinterest is one of the latest social media tools available on the Internet. On a very basic level, it is a virtual bulletin board for organizing web site images. Since it is largely image- rather than text- based and is simple to use, it has great potential for promoting library resources and services to a wide range of library users. The visual aspect can support the needs of users with different learning styles, as well as individual faculty teaching styles. It can also be used as a means to highlight campus and local events, or serve as a teaching enhancement tool. At MCC-Longview Library, we utilize Pinterest to promote our services and resources to the Millennial generation of students as well as faculty and the general public. This session will cover the basics of setting up a Pinterest account and provide examples of some of the promotional and curriculum support applications that MCC-Longview Library has found to be particularly effective.

Student employees often make up a large portion of a library’s employee pool. To ensure consistent customer service we must be able to rely on our students to provide the same professional atmosphere as our full-time staff. At Loras College, we have created a path for students to successfully bridge the divide between functioning as a college student and functioning as an employee. We strive to prepare them for future employment by providing them with as close to a real world work environment as possible. This process begins when they are interviewed and continues through training, evaluations and on-the-job guidance. While doing this, it is essential to keep in mind the reality that a college education is their top priority.

Our student employees are the “face of the library” and may be the only contact other students have with our services. We keep this in mind when planning for their overall achievement as library employees. Some of our tools for success includes online application forms, regular evaluations, job descriptions, a success manual, a procedures/ policies manual, a project sheet, a “who to call” list, call number flash cards, shelving sheets, themed meetings at the beginning of each semester, employee of the month recognition, substitute of the month recognition, a “what if” box, and more. None of this has been achieved without trial and error. The tools that have been particularly useful, those that were not ultimately successful, and ideas for the future will be shared.

Distance education is becoming ubiquitous within higher education -- more online courses, more students taking them and more faculty teaching them. In response, many libraries have expanded their online holdings to make access and discovery more convenient for both local and distance users, and have created services for distance learners and teachers. Unfortunately, distance students and faculty may be unaware of these services and resources: if you build it, they might not come. This session will describe the multi-faceted approach taken by librarians at Kansas State University Libraries to bridge the gap between what has been built for the distance learning population and what that population uses.

Central to these efforts was a survey designed to simultaneously educate distance patrons and faculty about the Libraries’ services and resources and gauge their level of awareness and use of those services and resources. This survey was distributed to all K-State undergraduate and graduate students who had taken a distance course at K-State during the 2010-2011 academic year. It was also distributed to all of K-State’s faculty who teach distance courses. The development and design of this survey will be described briefly and lessons for successful adoption of this method by other libraries will be highlighted. Significant attention will be given to the results of the survey, including both expected and unexpected responses. The Distance Education team expected for example, that many distance students were unaware of library services and resources, but the number of students who expressed no knowledge or use of distance-specific services and learning environments was shocking. The survey results revealed that intensive promotion and marketing of library services and resources for distance patrons and faculty was needed.

The bulk of this session will be spent discussing ways in which the Distance Education team has responded to the gaps identified by the survey, and how these measures could be implemented in other libraries. Many steps have been taken to promote the Libraries to distance learners and teachers, including the revision of distance student webpages, the creation and implementation of a toll-free help number, the creation of student and faculty flyers, and the organization of distance learning theme weeks for the Libraries’ social media efforts. The Distance Education Team also met with representatives from the Graduate School and the Division of Continuing Education to share results and brainstorm new ways to reach out to this population. These and many other current activities will be discussed in detail. The session will end with a discussion of other avenues for promotion and outreach to the distance learning population including liaison work with distance program coordinators, creation of specialized library programming and instruction for distance programs, and the centralization of services, resources and online collections.

If you build it they probably won’t come – not unless promotion is coordinated in a comprehensive, wide-reaching way. This session will arm academic librarians with the ideas and tools necessary to do that.

Many people are under the impression that they are not creative, have no capacity to be creative, and cannot improve or increase their creativity. In this interactive presentation, the presenter will show that everyone has the capacity to be creative, and with a little time and effort, can increase and improve their professional and personal creativity.

This interactive workshop will begin by asking participants to self-assess their own creativity. We will then compare the results to a study that asked young people about their personal creativity. This discussion will launch us into a discussion of, and definition for, creativity.

Then, we will tackle some of the common barriers that hamper us from harnessing the creativity that exists inside us all: exhaustion, distraction, laziness and a lack of focus. By breaking through these barriers, we can learn how to enhance and strengthen our own personal and professional creativity. The presenter will break down the process of becoming more creative into simple concepts and ideas that anyone can follow and utilize to increase their own creativity: cultivating your curiosity and interests, promoting flow in your everyday life, protecting your creative energy, internalizing support structures, and applying your creative energy. Many of these steps will include engaging activities for the participants to complete, and which they can take home with them to use in the future, in order to boost their creativity; for example, we will brainstorm ideas for how to make an everyday, mundane activity, more fun, interesting, and exciting so that that activity is transformed into a more productive and creative time.

During the internalizing support structures portion of the workshop, we will talk about the importance of knowing yourself inside and out; participants will be asked to name their most obvious characteristic (how their best friend would describe them) and then think of the opposite of that trait. Participants will then brainstorm ways to strengthen that opposite trait and will share their thoughts in small groups.

Participants will also be asked to think about their own instruction during this interactive session. During a discussion of the importance and value of breaking things down to their most basic elements, participants will be asked to close their eyes and think about what’s really important for their students to learn from their class, course, or lesson. They will be asked to make a mental scene or movie about what this looks like. Then, they will open their eyes and describe what they pictured to one of their neighbors.

By participating in these, as well as other, engaging activities, participants will learn how to improve and harness their personal and professional creativity and also take away valuable tips and techniques to improve the creativity they display in the classroom.

From smartphones to tablets, our patrons are accessing our sites from a large variety of devices. Is your website ready? Learn how to design and build an appealing functional website that responds and adapts to the patron’s demands.

Libraries frequently built completely separate mobile websites that offered a simplified subset of the full site. In addition to reduced content, the library was left with two websites to maintain.

Using Responsive Web Design techniques, this presentation focuses on transforming your website so that a single design will adapt and respond to the to the user’s device. Explore using Foundation, a CSS framework, to craft an appealing functional design to meet our patron’s needs.

A library director and a graduate assistant compare notes and discuss their assessment of the first year of operation of a new academic library facility, focusing on student services and engagement. They built a brand new library, but is it a home run or a foul ball?

The new Schusterman Library building at OU-Tulsa opened in 2011, and was designed with information literacy education and customer service as core operational priorities. This talk will focus on the first year of operation in this new state-of-the-art facility and how services and programs are being assessed for their effectiveness with our student users. This discussion will include:

The Knowledge Commons: Because we envision libraries as collaborative community spaces, the nerve center of the library is the Knowledge Commons. Equipped with both PCs and iMacs, this open space encourages student engagement and interaction. Servicing the Commons is a team of seven graduate assistants. Collectively, they staff the “AskHere” desk and offer the first line of reference assistance – through a blend of traditional desk time, chat reference, and roaming reference models – and they are backed by the collective experience of our reference librarians and on-site writing tutors. This unique peer-to-peer reference service encourages an informal atmosphere in which students feel comfortable asking for on-the-spot assistance.

The Arts & Information Gallery: The 900 square foot digital Arts & Information Gallery, equipped with five plasma screens, furthers information literacy education through its varying multimedia exhibits. The first exhibit focused on the history of OU-Tulsa, while the second was a traveling exhibit from the National Library of Medicine. The third exhibit, OU-Tulsa Reads, engaged the campus community through interviewing students, staff and faculty about inspiring books. A 20x20 event was held last October to introduce the campus to the Gallery, allowing participants to present on fun, wide-ranging topics.

Study Spaces: Compared with the previous facility, the Schusterman Library more than doubles the available seating, offering many different options for students. A new quiet reading room provides a comfortable environment for independent scholars or for students who need to work together in relative silence. Study carrels are a good option for individual students, while large tables, casual seating areas, and two custom-built student conference rooms offer spaces for group work.

Our talk will include two very distinct voices with different points of view – One is that of the library director who oversaw the four-year project of building the new library; the other is that of a library school graduate student who works as part of the team in the Knowledge Commons. How the larger planning effort meets the day-to-day expectations and needs of our student clientele is of primary importance in this overall assessment effort, and how our assessments will guide the library in its future planning efforts will be discussed in detail.