Roundup

February Library Tech Roundup

We’re debuting a new series this month: a roundup inspired by our friends at Hack Library School! Each month, the LITA bloggers will share selected library tech links, resources, and ideas that resonated with us. Enjoy – and don’t hesitate to tell us what piqued your interest recently in the comments section! Brianna M. Get excited: This month I discovered some excellent writing related to research data management. If you’ve ever wondered… –>  What Drives Academic Data Sharing? Excellent, spot on advice from Celia Emmelhainz –> Things You Can Do As a Library Student to Prepare for a Career as a Data Librarian UW-Madison unveiled our new electronic lab notebook this past fall and we’re continuing to educate the community about it.  –>  Manage Your Data with LabArchives Stacy always teaches me stuff. This time it’s about the tool Docker.  –>  A Gentle Introduction to Docker for Reproducible Research More and…

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Join LITA’s Imagineering IG at ALA Annual

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Breanne Kirsch. During the upcoming 2015 ALA Annual Conference, LITA’s Imagineering Interest Group will host the program “Unknown Knowns and Known Unknowns: How Speculative Fiction Gets Technological Innovation Right and Wrong.” A panel of science fiction and fantasy authors will discuss their work and how it connects with technological developments that were never invented and those that came about in unimagined ways. Tor is sponsoring the program and bringing authors John Scalzi, Vernor Vinge, Greg Bear, and Marie Brennan. Baen Books is also sponsoring the program by bringing Larry Correia to the author panel. John Scalzi wrote the Old Man’s War series and more recently, Redshirts, which won the 2013 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Vernor Vinge is known for his Realtime/Bobble and Zones of Thought Series and a number of short fiction stories. Greg Bear has written a number of series,…

Original Content

Tools for Creating & Sharing Slide Decks

Lately I’ve taken to peppering my Twitter network with random questions. Sometimes my questions go unanswered but other times I get lively and helpful responses. Such was the case when I asked how my colleagues share their slide decks. Figuring out how to share my slide decks has been one of those things that consistently falls to the bottom of my to-do list. It’s important to me to do so because it means I can share my ideas beyond the very brief moment in time that I’m presenting them, allowing people to reuse and adapt my content. Now that I’m hooked on the GTD system using Trello, though, I said to myself, “hey girl, why don’t you move this from the someday/maybe list and actually make it actionable.” So I did. Here’s my dilemma. When I was a library school student I began using SlideShare. There are a lot of great things about…

2015

ALA Midwinter 2015 LITA Preconference Review: How User Testing Can Improve the User Experience of Your Library Website

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Tammi Owens Last July, Winona State University’s Darrell W. Krueger Library rolled out a completely new website. This January we added to that new user experience by upgrading to LibGuides and LibAnswers v2. Now, we’re looking for continuous improvement through continuous user experience (UX) testing. Although I have some knowledge of the history and general tenets of user experience and website design, I signed up for this LITA pre-conference to dive into some case studies and ask specific questions of UX specialists. I hoped to come away with a concrete plan or framework for UX testing at our library. Specifically, I wanted to know how to implement the results of UX testing on our website. The instructors Kate Lawrence is the Vice President of User Research at EBSCO. Deirdre Costello is the Senior User Experience Researcher at EBSCO. I was a little…

2015

ALA Midwinter 2015 LITA Preconference Review: Introduction to Practical Programming

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Anthony Wright de Hernandez The Friday before Midwinter officially started, I attended the LITA preconference session Introduction to Practical Programming. As a first-time conference attendee with SQL, XML, PHP, HTML, and Visual Basic experience, I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect from a session that encouraged attendance by participants with no programming background. I chose to attend because I want to learn Python and thought this session would provide a good introduction to the language. The Instructor Elizabeth Wickes, a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, clearly knows programming in general and Python in particular. Her instructional style for this session was conversational and informative. Her passion and knowledge kept the daylong session engaging. The mix of basic programming information with Python-specific information ensured that no part of the day was wasted for anyone. The Session The session began…

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Share Your Committee and IG Activities on the LITA Blog!

The LITA Blog features original content by LITA members on technologies and trends relevant to librarians. The writers represent a variety of perspectives, from library students to public, academic, and special librarians. The blog also delivers announcements about LITA programming, conferences, and other events, and serves as a place for LITA committees to share information back with the community if they so choose. Sharing on the LITA blog ensures a broad audience for your content. Five recent LITA blog posts (authored by Brianna Marshall, Michael Rodriguez, Leanne Olson, Bryan Brown, and John Klima) have been picked up by American Libraries Direct – and most posts have been viewed hundreds of times and shared dozens of times on social media. John Klima’s post on 3D printers has been shared 40 times from the LITA Twitter account and another 40 times directly from the blog (a cumulative record), Bryan Brown’s post on MOOCs…

2015

LITA Interest Group Events at ALA Midwinter

Are you headed to ALA Midwinter this weekend and curious about what the LITA interest groups will be up to? See below for a current listing of LITA IG events! Saturday, January 31, 2015 10:30am to 11:30am Imagineering Interest Group, Hyatt Regency McCormick Adler/CC 24C The Imagineering Interest Group will meet to plan for future ALA Annual programs and meetings. We will also talk about future group endeavors, such as creating online resources. Please attend if you are interested in working with the group.  Additional Information: Librarianship, Adult Services, Collection Development, Popular Culture, Reader’s Advisory Open Source Systems Interest Group, Hyatt Regency McCormick Burnham/CC 23C Meeting to discuss future projects for the Open Source Systems Interest Group. Search Engine Optimization, Hyatt Regency McCormick Jackson Park/CC 10D Attendees will have an opportunity to share their experiences with search engine optimization. We will also discuss the SEO Best Practices Wiki entry in Library Success:…

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We Want YOU to Write a Guest Post!

Yes, you! Are you looking for a platform to share your ideas with the library tech community? We’re a pretty friendly bunch in LITA and we hope you’ll consider sharing your intriguing library tech-related stories, plans, failures, hacks, code snippets – whatever! – here on the blog this year. There is a lot of room for contributor creativity, so get excited. You do not need to be a LITA member in order to write a guest post, though it’s great if you are! To submit an idea for consideration, please email LITA blog editor Brianna Marshall at briannahmarshall(at)gmail(dot)com sharing a bit about yourself and a brief summary of your post topic.

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Tell your LITA story

Building on ALA Midwinter 2014’s #becauseLITA initiative, members of LITA’s membership development committee want to pull together a short video that captures your response to one of the following prompts: What was your best LITA moment? How has LITA made your life awesome? What interests you most about LITA? That means we want YOU to participate! Yes, I know – sounds like a lot of pressure to talk on camera, but it’s really not that bad. Plus you’ll get everlasting appreciation from the LITA crew for helping out! In particular, we are looking to hear the perspectives of LITA members who are students, new professionals and/or new to LITA, and longstanding LITA members. Specifics Length can be as brief as a Vine (6 seconds) up to two minutes, though be warned we may need to only use a portion of what you submit. Please keep it short and sweet! Include…

Original Content

Digital Curation Tools I Want to Learn

When I first started my job as Digital Curation Coordinator in June, I didn’t quite know what I would be doing. Then I started figuring it out.  As I’ve gotten settled, I’ve realized that I want to be more proactive in identifying tools and platforms that the researchers I’m working with are using so that I can connect with their experience more easily. However, the truth is that I find it hard to know what tools I should focus on. What usually happens when I learn about a new tool is a cursory read through the documentation… I familiarize myself well enough to share in a few sentences what it does, but most of the time I don’t become incredibly familiar. There are just soooo many tools out there. It’s daunting. Knowing my tendencies, I decided it would be a good challenge for me to dig deeper into three areas…