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

Giving a Voice to Audio Collections

Is the audio portion of your digital collection lacking? Do you feel that audio collections are archaic and creating an audio collection is both time consuming and expensive? This type of thinking is antiquated. You can skip transcription altogether and focus solely on indexing by using free software like OHMS (Oral History Metadata Synthesizer). During our presentation we will show you how to use this free software. If you want to transcribe yourself and save time you can use free software such as Express Scribe and use USB foot pedals to speed up the process. In addition to these options, accurate automated speech to text technology is on the way and costs about 5% the price of what standard transcribing services charge. At this price, audio collections should be making a comeback and be used to supplement and enhance digital collections. This presentation will be twofold. The first half will focus on some of the audio collections being put together at the University of Dubuque and how the audio collection is being created and used in the classroom. The second half of the presentation will focus on the up-and-coming technology transforming audio collections

Local Hosting of Faculty-Created Open Education Resources

Rising costs of secondary education institutions, coupled with the inflated cost of textbooks, have forced students to make decisions on whether they can afford the primary materials for their classes. Publishers working to supply digital access codes, which limit the ability of students to copy, print, or share the materials, or resell the textbook after the course is over, have further pushed students into forgoing purchasing materials. In recent years, institutions have moved to support OER (Open Education Resources) initiatives to provide students a cost-free primary text or supplement to their materials. This allows students unfettered access to quality resources that help drive engagement in courses, from homework to discussions. While larger institutions or in-state partnerships with resource sharing consortiums, such as the MnPALS cooperation with the state of Minnesota, provide access to platforms like Pressbooks, smaller institutions and private colleges don’t always have the ability to negotiate these types of relationships. In this case study, I will cover the foundations necessary to start a low-cost, self-hosted solution to support faculty creation of OER material and the available resources that the University of Dubuque utilized in their development process. This overview will briefly cover the skills and knowledge needed to support the growth of this initiative with minimal complexity and as little jargon as possible

The effect of application icon style design factors on the download intention of users

With the heavier reliance of the current generation to the digital world, mobile applications have become an integral part of smartphone users. The mobile application industry has been growing significantly and competition among applications and application developers have been fierce. All applications available in iOS App Store and Google Play Store are listed as icons. These icons serve as the initial visual representation of a mobile application and provide consumers a quick and intuitive representation of an application. It is the first and most powerful way to engage users in highly competitive app stores, thus, an effective mobile application icon design is essential for the success of an application to be downloaded. As icon style is identified as an element considered in the design of an icon, this study determines if the icon style design factors can help in the increased intention of users to download an application. By integrating a factor known to be affected by the use of an icon style, as well as affect the purchase (i.e. download) intention of users, this study was able to explore a reason for the effect of icon style design factors to download intention. This study also defined a set of icon style design guidelines that considered the significance of the icon style design factors. Emotion is the factor identified to have an effect on user download intention. It is also a factor that is determined by the use of icon style. Furthermore, emotion has been known to have an influence in the relationship of design and purchase/download intentions. With this thought, this study hypothesized emotion experienced by users to mediate the effect of the icon style design factors to their intention to download an application. Age has also been a common variable in icon style literatures wherein preferences, performances, etc. are said to be influenced by age of the user. Thus, this study hypothesized that age moderates the effect of the icon style design factors to the download intention of users. In order to prove the proposed hypotheses and suitably achieve the objectives of the study, the instrument of the main experiment was designed to simulate the scenario of browsing through an application store showing different redesigns of the same icon applying different levels of the icon style design factors. The respondents were surveyed regarding their chosen design, felt emotions, and download intention. After sufficient data was collected, it was analyzed using SEM analysis. From the results of the experimentation and analysis, the three icon style design factors considered were found to be significant in the download intention of users. Particularly, users are more inclined to download the icon design with subtle to no texture, subtle to no shadow, and bright or no highlights. Based on the post-interviews, the users would mainly base their response and selection from their perceived visual aesthetic of the icon. It was also determined from the analysis that emotion partially mediated the effect of the icon style design factors to download intention. With this, emotion can be used to explain the relationship between the icon style design factors to download intention. Based on the post-interview, the respondents said that the app icons with no texture and no shadow effects trigger their positive emotions more since they are more visually pleasing, thus, making them lean more to download the application with those icons. Lastly, no moderation effect was found from age. Increased exposure and familiarity of individuals of all ages in the digital world have led to potentially minimal difference in the effect of age in the relationship of the icon style design factors to emotion and download intention in this study