Notes from recent un/conferences

I’ve attended a handful of great conferences so far this winter. I love sharing, and while reading someone else’s conference notes isn’t the most thrilling activity, perhaps you will find something useful.

  • METRO Annual Conference at Baruch College
    • highlight: digital collections projects
  • Future Perfect: Emerging Tech in Libraries, virtual conference from NISO
    • highlights: possible futures for libraries; 3D printing + IP rights in libraries
  • THATcamp Libraries in Boston
    • highlights: tools for digital collections projects; libraries + MOOCs
  • Research Data Symposium at Columbia University
    • highlights: supporting data management at your institution, start to finish
  • Theorizing the Web at CUNY Graduate Center
    • highlights: New Aesthetic, MOOCs, bots

Easy LibGuides makeover

PLEASE NOTE: As of 2015, this blog post is outdated! It discusses customization for LibGuides 1.0, which is no longer supported! If you have LibGuides, you should be on LibGuides 2.0, and this post is not useful to you.

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I’ll be honest: I didn’t know what LibGuides were until I was well into my library & information science graduate program, and at first I thought they were pretty dorky since they looked so dated. But I’ve since come around, and overall they’re great — easy to create, easy to edit, and fairly reliable as software. The default skin could use some work, though. We recently updated the look of John Jay’s LibGuides (we call them Subject Guides) and I thought I’d show you how we did.

One LibGuide before and after (click for larger)
My LibGuide before and after (click for larger)

A more modern look for your LibGuides:

Read more

What does emerging tech in the library look like?

When I tell people that my title is Emerging Technologies & Distance Services Librarian, without fail they ask me, “So what does that mean?” I usually make a hokey joke about how I’m still trying to find out, but I’m actually serious, and that’s the best part of the job. Consider this weblog an idea board and a lab notebook as I explore new territories and revisit old ones.

A few things I’m excited about are NFC, NLP, 3D printers and scanners, quick-printing book machines, mass transcription, Wikipedia, MOOCs, digital humanities, drones, Google Fiber,and social media. I hope to investigate more of these in future posts, but let’s not forget that sometimes emerging tech also means reusing and repurposing old tech, too (especially in libraries!). With that in mind, my next post will detail what I was up to earlier this week.