I had an amazing time at ACRL in Indianapolis, learned a lot and talked with some really smart, engaged people. I also had a blast presenting on Hacking The Learner Experience with Brian Mathews and Lauren Pressley. I’ll be posting some of the themes that I took away from the conference soon, but I figured I would get our slides up in the meantime.
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Rhode Island Library Association Conference
I had the opportunity of visiting the Ocean State on Friday to present at the RILA annual conference. Rhode Island library folk are really fun to talk to and have a lot of great ideas. One of the highlights for me were the invited speakers on Friday. They were three folks from the Occupy Wall Street People’s Library and talked about how the library space in Zuccotti park was seen as a place of dialogue and public discourse. They also exhorted us to occupy our own libraries and create those opportunities for public discourse around the really big issues that are facing us as a country.
It was a fun conference and there were a lot of thought provoking questions after my session. I’ve posted the slides below:
Empowering Users and Ourselves: Tech Trends in Libraries
View more presentations from Andy Burkhardt
Library Technology Conference Presentation and Roundup
I attended the Library Technology Conference this past week in St. Paul, MN. I’ve heard it’s an answer to Computers in Libraries and Internet Librarian being on the coasts and the need for a library tech conference in the Midwest. It did not disappoint. Not only did I get to travel back to the state where I grew up and was able to play golf the weather was so nice, it was also one of the better organized and useful conferences I’ve attended.
I presented on using Mobile Phone Polling to increase student engagement in the classroom. The session was a lot of fun and I always get new ideas from talking to audience members.
In addition to presenting I attended a lot of awesome sessions. Some of my highlight’s of the conference include:
- Your Library Website Stinks and it’s Your Fault - This presentation by Matthew Reidsma is about web usability, focusing your web presence, and the importance of improving your library web site.
- An Introduction to Design Thinking Workshop - Paul Zenke facilitated a fun, hands-on, engaging workshop on user experience and the using the design thinking process to create solutions for libraries.
- An Introduction to jQuery Mobile: Creating Simple Mobile Webpages - A solid workshop and good resources by Brooke Bergantzel and Ian Mason on how to get started creating mobile websites using jQuery mobile (it’s really pretty easy if you know HTML/CSS!)
- Library Data and Student Success - a presentation I heard a lot about (I was presenting at the same time so didn’t see it). Some U of M folks collected pre-existing data from circ stats, analytics, workstation usage, etc. to correlate library usage with student success.
I would recommend this conference to anyone interested in library tech. The keynotes were really inspiring, especially the one from Larry Johnson, CEO of the New Media Consortium. I will definitely keep this on my radar for future conferences.