Brick and Click Report

I attended the 10th Annual Brick and Click Conference last week. It was at NW Missouri State University. One of my colleagues was not that impressed with the location for some reason. There was a dearth of Starbucks for her, I guess. We also "enjoyed" driving all the way through Nebraska.

The best session I went to was by Eric Jennings and Kathryn Tvaruzka of UW-Eau Claire on "Quick and Dirty Library Promotions"

In today's economy, money for promotion of library services is at a premium. Find out how the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire's McIntyre Library has inexpensively changed the atmosphere and has broken stereotypes typically associated with the library and librarians through library promotions and activities.

Some of the best ideas included:

• The "How I met my Valentine" Contest.
• Secret Post community art project.
• "Last Call" event before classes begin. Here are some videos of "Last Call".
• Give away fortune cookies to students and faculty. They recommend this place as a supplier. They are not just boring pens or bookmarks. Some of the fortunes go something like: Ask a librarian for help, get an A on your paper. Or -- You will find the love of your life on the 2nd foor, it is a history book.
• Youth and family programs. Have a summer reading program like public libraries. Invite children in for story time. The college kids will also enjoy it when the tots walk into the library.
  

I also went to some other sessions such as:

• Getting Ready to Go Mobile: A Primer for the Uninitiated
• The Library Through Students' Eyes: Exploring Student Research Needs in the Brick and Click Space
• Making Significant Cuts to an Approval Plan without Drawing Any Blood
• Embedded Librarianship: A Briefing from the Trenches
• Carrie also grabbed the handout for Mobile Patrons: Better Services on the Go

Carrie and Sandra also had presentations, and I think they went pretty well.

• Getting Started with Assessment: Using the Minute Paper to Find Trends in Student Learning
• Access to Video Material in Academic Libraries

The best part was being able to meet and chat with online and real-life friends at the pizza place when the conference was done.

Brick and Click Symposium Stuff

Last week, I went to the Brick and Click Symposium. Many months ago, they accepted a paper of mine (Comparing Bananas with Grapes: Ebook Use Data from a Bunch of Vendors), and I traveled there to give a presentation on the topic.

Enough about me. I learned a heck of a lot, and I tweeted a bunch of the sessions. Below are the major things I learned about (or had good demonstrations of) at the symposium.

1. Conduit might be a good service to create a library toolbar, in addition to our LibX installation.
2. Use Jing to create short screencast videos (with audio) to explain how to search particular databases.
3. "Informing Innovation: Tracking Student Interest in Emerging Library Technologies at Ohio University" by Char Booth.
4. One can use a LibGuide page as the base for a conference presentation, such as this.
5. Put in short poll quizes in LibGuides in order to get feedback from the students in real time.
6. View your bit.ly statistics to see who is clicking on the library twitter links or from your blog.
7. Promote your special collections. Put in external or reference links in wikipedia for the relevant encyclopedia entries.
8. If you have any YouTube videos, put them in a scroller on the front of the website.
9. SubjectsPlus could be used as an alternative to LibGuides.
10. A Virtual Librarian in Any Class (Co-presented by Elizabeth Fox and Laura Wight) had links to a bunch of great resources, such as the Stuck in the Social Web Pocket Reference guide.
11. Here is a plug for some of my LSW friends -- @webgoddess, @pigsinspace, @joshuamneff, @mstabbycat, and @roycekitts, @hbraum, @cclibrarian, and @gohomekiki. See the pics here, here and here.