Cauldrons of Content: Recipes for Library Video Tutorials

Video tutorials can be a quick and affordable solution for presenting knowledge, skills or resource awareness. They can educate people at their own pace, providing the option for viewers to pause, practice the new skill as they view the video, and even to return to the material over and over again until the skill or knowledge is learned or attained. Regardless of your technical background, this practical session will equip librarians or library staff with all of the essential ingredients needed to begin cooking up video tutorials right away! Key topics will include screen recording software options, best practices for video tutorial content and length, promoting video tutorials, tracking tutorial effectiveness, and tips for liaising with stakeholders within your library

Applications for Content-Specific Taxonomy, Exposed Forms and Fieldbased Views in Higher Ed

This session will use two examples from UGA School of Law\u27s website (“Course Offerings” and “Scholarship & Writing Opportunities”) to illustrate how taxonomy vocabularies, field-based views and exposed forms in blocks can simplify higher education web content, increase staff productivity, and make searching for content more user-friendly to site visitors. Step-by-step instructions will be outlined for re-creating each example in Drupal 7 including a list of required modules. Tips will be shared for identifying areas where you can apply this method on your own site as well as general ideas for generating buy-in from colleagues for making the case to switch to this method. Snapshots of before and after approaches to each example will also be provided to further illustrate the usefulness of content-specific taxonomies, field-based views and exposed forms in blocks

Infographics on the Brain

Higher Education is often known for a certain type of learning experience in the classroom. Students expect thick books and in many areas of study, the Socratic method, but generally little in the way of visual aids. Students in other areas of study, including K-12, are increasingly benefiting from their educators using infographics in the classroom. The potential uses in higher education range from giving your course syllabus a facelift, to illustrating facts visually, and even to teaching students to create their own infographics as a practice-ready skill. This session will quickly explore why today’s students are drawn to visuals and retain information better from combinations of graphics and text, give examples of educational infographics, and allow the majority of the time for discussing tips and using the free web application Piktochart for creating your own infographic to use in the classroom

Top 5 TS-Centric Webinar & Virtual Conference Highlights

The increase of wonderful, FREE programming being delivered virtually right now and available to audiences around the world is truly amazing. It can be overwhelming to sift through the options (especially if your inbox has exponentially exploded as mine has over the past 3 months). Take a trip back in time with me as I share below my favorite sessions that I feel offered the most valuable content to those of us in technical services positions. TechScans is a blog to share the latest trends and technology tools for technical services law librarians. The official blog of the TS-SIS and OBS-SIS AALL groups

Conference Roundup: Smart Cataloging - Beginning the Move from Batch Processing to Automated Classification

This article reviewed the Amigos Online Conference titled “Work Smarter, Not Harder: Innovating Technical Services Workflows” keynote session delivered by Dr. Terry Reese on February 13, 2020. Excerpt: As the developer of MarcEdit, a popular metadata suite used widely across the library community, Reese’s current work is focused on the ways in which libraries might leverage semantic web techniques in order to transform legacy library metadata into something new. So many sessions related to using new technologies in libraries or academia, although exciting, are not practical enough to put into everyday use by most librarians. Reese’s keynote, titled Smart Cataloging: Beginning the Move from Batch Processing to Automated Classification, was unique and powerful in that he discussed the more practical applications of machine learning for tomorrow, rather than a decade or more into the future

Drupal Forms: Looking Outside the ILS for a Simpler Workflow Solution

The article discusses the service had previously offered through online requests, which is crucial to mitigating health and safety during fall 2020 and 2021. Topics include designed a solution that worked for patrons and staffers alike; and longer reshelving times due to the evolving quarantine periods following item check-ins in the building

Review of Becoming a Library Leader: Seven Stages of Leadership Development for Academic Librarians

Review of Freedman, James M. and Freedman, Shin (Ed.) (2020). Becoming a Library Leader: Seven Stages of Leadership Development for Academic Librarians. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries

Reprogramming to Unplug During COVID-19: My Never Ending Story

In this short candid article member Rachel Evans provides effective strategies for unwinding during COVID-19 including practicing more mindfulness and other activities to find balance while teleworking. AALL\u27s New Voices is for members to share insights on any aspect of law librarianship. Pieces in this series also appear on the Members Open Forum in addition to being published as part of the AALL monthly eNewsletter. Topics in the series include: starting a new role, insights on professional development, recommending a favorite resource, providing an overview of an AALL webinar, or your take on an article from AALL Spectrum, Law Library Journal, or KnowItAALL

Cleaning Up Messy Records: Uncovering Match-Points in ILS and Repository Data

Evans shared the process and learning takeaways from a recent project, comparing and cleaning up the data in both a repository and library catalog for items from a single collection. This post discusses the need for knowing how to pull good lists and the benefits of solid control fields in the data from multiple different systems. It also shared candidly the challenges one faces when fixing errors and attempting to make fields more consistent for platforms with very different records and standards. TechScans is a blog to share the latest trends and technology tools for technical services law librarians. The official blog of the TS-SIS and OBS-SIS AALL groups

“Tech is easy, people are hard”: Philosophical Takeaways from Cat Moon’s CALICon Keynote

In this blog post for AALL\u27s CS-SIS Evans shares her favorite bits of advice from the recent Computer Assisted Legal Instruction Conference keynote delivered by Caitlin Cat Moon, including design philosophies for making resources, services and workflows more user-centered and specific book recommendations