NJLA 2009 — NJ Libraries Rock!
Posted by Denise O'Shea on April 30, 2009
Yesterday, 4/29, I attended the annual NJLA conference in Long Branch, NJ. Here is a brief synopsis:
- Keynote speaker — Paco Underhill, the CEO of a research and consulting organization (Envirosell) that focuses on retail clients. Paco is the author of several classic books on retail, and is an regular contributor on NPR & the BBC. His talk was about how and why we should merchandise our libraries. His presentation was insightful, humorous and contained some great ideas. He gave us examples of how to make the exterior and interior of our libraries more attractive to patrons. He suggested that we use art and objects to highlight our collections. He talked about library signage and why ‘check out’ is a better term than ‘circulation’ for the front desk. A detailed post about his talk is available here – http://sla-divisions.typepad.com/itbloggingsection/2009/04/why-we-borrow-a-talk-at-njla.html
- ACRL/CUS Luncheon — Awards were presented to WPUNJ for technology innovation, TCNJ for research and Rutgers for distinguished service. The lunchtime speaker was Eileen Fenton from Portico — a non-profit organization that offers a permanent archive for scholarly literature published in electronic format. Her talk was inspiring as she outlined a number of ways that libraries can take a leadership role in managing digital initiatives for their institutions. This is something that our director firmly believes in and is working toward through our recent acquisition of a hosted ContentDM environment where the FDU Library can begin archiving digital content.
- IT Section — Ranjna Das, the NJLA webmaster and a college friend of mine, gave an excellent presentation on how to use several Google tools to enhance your library’s web presence and to learn more about the use of your web resources. The tools are Google Analytics, Custom Search, Google Maps, and Feedburner. I have created numerous Custom Search engines and am a regular user of Feedburner. I know that there are others on our library staff that use Google Analytics and I have assisted a few of you with Google Map questions. There is a lot more that we can do with all of these tools.
- Subject Guides 2.0 — this last session is the one that I moderated. The presenter was Sharon Yang, Systems Librarian at Rider University. Sharon gave an excellent presentation that looked at a variety of tools (both commercial and open source) that libraries can use to build interactive, multi-media, web 2.0 subject guides. I came away with a lot of good ideas from this session. Sharon showed us how to use blogs, wikis, and social bookmarking tools like del.icio.us to guild subject guides. She also reviewed some popular commercial and open source subject guide packages, and discussed the pros and cons of each.
Other FDU Librarians were in attendance and should feel free to add their feedback in the comments section.
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Mary Marks said
Thanks for the update, Denise.
With regards to doing various things with Google, Lyrasis is offering online training (May 27-28; 2 hours each day) on all the cool tools within Google that many people don’t know about.
http://www.lyrasis.org
Eleanor Friedl said
Thank you, indeed, Denise, for the concise review, to which I have two comments:
1) One point made by Paco Underhill in his keynote on visual communication that I’d like to reiterate (its having long been a pet peeve of mine, too), is that while people may remember information they’ve read on passing a flier/sign or two at the checkout desk, when confronted with 10-20 signs all over the counter, they generally block altogether such visual clutter!
It may be worthwhile to remind ourselves that many people come to the library to find a quiet place to study, a serene environment conducive to concentration and reflection (quiet visually as well as aurally).
2) Yes, Eileen Fenton did make a meaningful point that librarians might well be in a position to take a leadership role in managing digital initiatives for their institutions. In light of our being in the infancy period of an era of expensive and rapidly changing technologies, her emphasis on there being no single, best approach (and certainly no inexpensive one) to preserving institutional archives, was well taken!