Homegrown Ingredients: Creating Tools When the Information Literacy Supermarket Fails You

When established sources change formats, switch platforms, or upgrade, they aren’t always user-friendly, especially for inexperienced researchers. After using ill-fitting and frustrating legal research tools for years, librarians and instructors at the University of Dubuque jumped in and created local homegrown tools. Instead of changing an effective assignment to bend to inadequate search tools, the course coordinator and library liaison created and adapted tools to fit the assignment. Capitalizing on the librarian’s research skills, the professor’s subject expertise, and the plethora of free tools, the learning experience students (and professors and librarians) have is now more rewarding. Rather than lead students through complicated methods of information hunting, customized research tools allowed instructors to focus on how to use the information. Creation of local tools can be time-intensive, but the resulting value to all involved is well worth the effort. Both librarians and instructors report that the database has significantly decreased the amount of time students spend selecting a topic, leaving more time to focus on application of resources, the actual learning objective. This session will provide a brief description of an introductory-level assignment, an overview of previous tools used, and the librarian\u27s role in the course. The presenter will also explain the process of creating a database and illustrative content narrative and the impact on student learning. Participants will engage with the final products and discuss how to apply these ideas to their own instruction

Come Together Like Voltron: Strategies for Intentional Reference

Public services includes both reference and instruction services, but why don\u27t the two work together? Train together? Reference is the public service the profession has tried to abandon. Integrating reference into instruction and training staff members side by side allows for ideas and solutions to be shared across professional boundaries. Reference staff can then use and mirror language the students hear in classrooms, steer students towards sources appropriate to the assignment, and open communication from reference staff to instruction librarians on the types of questions they are seeing at the reference desk. Reference interactions can spur conversations with faculty for instruction and open up collaboration possibilities beyond the classroom. Reference is often done in isolation, both as a service and as a staff. Staffing the desk is a solo task and most of the conversations that happen with other members of a reference team only happen in passing or are about little more than swapping shifts. Taking a systematic approach to reference takes the burden off of the individual and creates a collaborative and intentional service. Reference services are vital to a library. Unlike other essential services, reference often lacks structure, support, or training beyond the very basics. Simple steps can be taken to rectify this. In this presentation, we will discuss some of the strategies we implemented like training IL staff and reference staff together, creating internal collaborative resources, scheduling regular reference team meetings, and coordinating reference staffing with instruction schedules allowing staff to have formal and informal conversations about reference

Prezi beyond its intended use: exploiting the potential

We live in a world where our students and patrons are increasingly likely to be digital natives, inhabiting an interactive, online world. Librarians seek to meet students and patrons in this digital world, but are often unsure how to transfer our activities and services from the face-to-face, print-based environment in which they were created. Prezi is a dynamic, web-based presentation software that allows creators to go beyond a simple slide- to-slide show and actually tell stories using a zoomable, customizable online canvas. But are creator-focused lectures all that Prezi can be used for? How might this digital canvas be employed for user-led experiences or tutorials? With children or in reader’s advisory? What opportunities exist to use Prezi as a bridge to connect library resources with library users in different ways? This session will cover the basic capabilities and utilities of Prezi as well as demonstrating creative library applications from both a public and an academic librarian. These include read-alike book webs, digital storyboards, web-based magnetic poetry activities, and online tutorials. Creating presentations in Prezi requires a bit of practice and experimentation, but the benefits of having free, cloud-based media that are easily embedded or linked in a webpage are well worth the effort

Prezi: Designing presentations that tell a story

Many of the processes and skills we as librarians teach are not linear, but complex and multi-layered. We know that modeling is one successful way to teach new skills, but we often craft presentations that are linear in nature, one slide following another. What message do we convey to students, and are they engaged in the learning process? What would a computer-based presentation look like that tells a story and demonstrates the different facets and layers of complex research and analytical skills? Prezi is a web-based presentation tool that leaves your old slides in the dust. It is dynamic --and we\u27re not talking an animated book hopping up and down followed by a nice fade transition. Prezi allows you to zoom in and out, use scale to show depth or focus attention, and easily integrates images, pdfs, and video to create media-rich, creative lessons. With the easy-to learn Prezi, you start with a blank canvas and a full palette of design tools to paint your content. Then, you design a path along, in, and around your content to tell the story. This session will introduce Prezi and its strengths, as well as demonstrate creative and successful applications to the academic library setting. But more importantly, this presentation will challenge participants to think about designing presentations (rather than creating them) in new and interesting ways that reach out and engage students and even professors. Comments and brainstorming ideas that participants did in small groups have been scanned and can be found at http://www.beckycanovan.com/2011/libtech-prezi/ ABOUT THE PRESENTER: Becky Canovan is Reference and Instruction Librarian at the University of Dubuque