With ALA’s annual conference in Orlando just around the corner, travel is in the plans for many librarians and staff. Fortunately, as I live in Florida, I don’t have that far to go. But if you do, then you’re going to need some good apps. I travel frequently and have a few of my favorite apps that I use for travel, and I’d like to share them with you: Airline App of Choice I personally only use two airlines so I can only speak to their particular apps, but seriously, if you have a smartphone and you aren’t using it to hold tickets or boarding passes, you’re missing out. You can also use your app to check flight times and delays, book future travel, or just to play around (one of my airline’s apps lets you send virtual postcards). PackPoint Even if it’s just a weekend trip, this app is…
Author: Stephanie Piccino
10 iPhone Tricks Every Librarian Should Know
We as librarians deal with questions every day. These days, questions tend to be about devices. We can’t be expected to know everything about every device, but it’s always good to have a few tools ready at our disposal. Here are some handy tricks to keep at the ready if anyone comes at you with an iPhone and demands service. Use your headphones as a camera shutter – It’s not a selfie stick (thank god) but it’s one way to trigger a remote shutter on your camera. Simply plug in the earbuds that came with your iPhone and use the volume buttons to snap away. Check which apps use the most battery – Some apps eat battery like it’s candy. Go into Settings >General > Battery > Battery Usage and find out which ones do the most damage so you can turn them off. …and take up the most space…
Express Your Shelf
This won’t be the first time I ever admit this, nor will it be the last, but boy am I out of touch. I’m more than familiar with the term “selfie”, which is when you take a photo of yourself. Heck, my profile pictures on Facebook, Twitter, and even here on LITA Blog are selfies. As much as I try to put myself above the selfie fray, I find myself smack in the middle of it. (I vehemently refuse to get a selfie stick, though. Just…no.) But I’d never heard of this “shelfie” phenomenon. Well, I have, but apparently there’s more than one definition. I had to go to Urban Dictionary, that proving ground for my “get off my yard”-ness, to learn it’s a picture of your bookshelf, apparently coined by author Rick Riordan. But I was under the impression that a shelfie is where you take a picture of…
Quick, Clear, Concise: Communicating Effectively
Recently I read an article that discussed digital signage at the San Jose State University library. The concerns raised by librarian Laurel Eby are very valid, especially if you don’t have any background in graphic design. Questions about content, slide duration, number of slides, and even branding are big questions that can impact how effectively your message gets across. Many, many jokes have been made about how short our attention spans are lately. (Ooh, look – a kitty!) But when you’re designing things that are meant to get – and, hopefully, keep – a person’s attention, there is a seed of truth behind the joke…and you can’t ignore it. Because if you ignore that, then your patrons will ignore you. When I studied television production, we were told about the “elevator pitch”. If you’re not familiar, imagine you’re in an elevator with a famous director – let’s say Steven Spielberg….
Passively Asking for Input: Museum Exhibits and Information Retention
One of my main research interests is in user experience design; specifically, how people see and remember information. Certain aspects of “seeing” information are passive; that is, we see something without needing to do anything. This is akin to seeing a “Return Materials Here” sign over a book drop: you see this area fills a function that you need, but other than looking for it and finding it, you don’t have to do much else. But how much of this do we actually acknowledge, little less remember? Countless times I’ve seen patrons fly past signs that tell them exactly where they need to find a certain book or when our library opens. It’s information they need but for some reason they haven’t gotten. So how can we make this more efficient? I visited the Boston Museum of Science recently and participated in their Hall of Human Life exhibit. Now, anyone…
Putting Pen to Paper
Back in January, The Atlantic ran an article on a new device being used at the Cooper Hewitt design museum in New York City. This device allows museum visitors to become curators of their own collections, saving information about exhibits to their own special account they can access via computer after they leave. This device is called a pen; Robinson Meyer, the article’s author, likens it to a “gray plastic crayon the size of a turkey baster”. I think it’s more like a magic wand. Not only can you use the pen to save information you think is cool, you can also interact with the museum at large: in the Immersion Room, for example, you can draw a design with your pen and watch it spring to life on the walls around you. In the Process Lab, you use the pen to solve real-life design problems. As Meyer puts it,…