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

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

“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

Digitize Your To-Do List: A Librarian\u27s Introduction to KanbanFlow

This session discussed the various ways in which the Kanban method of task management, and specifically the online application KanbanFlow can turn a librarian\u27s paper to-do lists into digital lists with auto-reminders, timers for enhancing focus, and many other tools for increasing productivity

Taking the Office Home: Telework with Trello & Slack

Amidst the anxiety, fear and overwhelm we are all feeling, many of us across the country have been scrambling to figure out teleworking for our libraries while setting up physical spaces at home. Evans outlines the solutions UGA Law Library deployed as they transitioned during a time of rapid change

Cooking Up Cauldrons of Content: Recipes for Video Tutorials

Explores how libraries can benefit from creating video tutorials as a means of library instruction. Includes recommendations for hardware and software, tips such as liaising with stakeholders, best practices for video tutorial content and length, tracking tutorial effectiveness, and more. Offers example combinations of hardware and software based on the type of tutorial and varying library budget sizes