Sponsored by The Library, University of California San Diego
Organized by the Professional Development Committee and ArLiSNAP
The Emerging Technology Forum will showcase ways in which information professionals are using new, free, and/or open-source technologies to make their jobs more efficient, their teaching more effective, or their collections more accessible.
Stop by to hear short lighting round presentations and visit technology stations for hands-on demonstrations about Crowdsourcing, If This Then That, Pinterest, Process Delineation/Concept Mapping, Tumblr, Viewshare, and Zotero.
Lightning Round Presentations
Moderator: Elizabeth Lane, Assistant Reference Librarian, Frick Art Reference Library
4:30 start time
If This Then That: Taming the Web Using IFTTT - Caitlin Pereira
Getting from Chaos to Strategy: Process Delineation in the Digital Age - John Trendler
Tumblr: a How-to - Bettina Smith
Crowdsourcing Projects, from Start to Finish - Mary-Michelle Moore
5:30 start time
Pinterest As More Than a Collection of Images - Shannon Lane
Building Interfaces to Digital Collections with Viewshare - Jefferson Bailey
Expanding Zotero's Image Universe: Building translators to harvest our digital collections - Alexander Watkins
If This Then That: Taming the Web Using IFTTT
Caitlin Pereira, Visual Resources Librarian, Massachusetts College of Art and Design
In the age of the smartphone the internet plays such a large role in work and personal lives, but often times essential parts of our digital toolbox don’t play well together, IFTTT can help bring them together. IFTTT, which stands for If This Then That, is a free web-based service that serves as your own personal programmer, creating automated actions between other web and mobile services. IFTTT can simplify social networking efforts in your institutions, help you keep an ear to the ground on certain topics across the Internet, or just aid in organizing your own digital life. While IFTTT cannot solve all Internet related conundrums, it is easy and flexible enough to remedy a few without breaking a sweat.
Getting from Chaos to Strategy: Process Delineation in the Digital Age
John M. Trendler, Curator of Visual Resources, Scripps College
Do you need to create, update or redesign a complex system, or even a simple one? Process delineation is simply putting actions or processes into a visual format. Whether it’s information architecture/wire-framing, a procedural document/digital workflow or a plan for storing your personal music and photos there are tools and techniques that ensure a more complete and efficient delineation of the process. As a visual learner passionate about technology I’ve probably spent too much time forcing concepts and processes into visual form, let me share some of the successful strategies I’ve encountered along the way. You don’t need to be an artist or designer to create helpful visual representations of how things work (or should work), it just requires some practice and patience.
Tumblr: a How-to
Bettina C. Smith, Librarian, Digital Projects, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
An introduction to the micro-blogging platform Tumblr. Launched in 2007, Tumblr is a fast-growing newcomer in the field of blogging and social media. It is a fabulous resource for art librarians and visual resource professionals because it is highly visual, very customizable, and easy to use. Unlike other blogging platforms, Tumblr is uniquely suited to short and sweet posts. This makes it a great tool for anyone who wants to have a blog presence but doesn't have the time to write 300-word posts. I will share tips and tricks of the tumbling trade and you will be on your way to sharing your collections and connecting with your patrons in new ways.
Crowdsourcing Projects, from Start to Finish
Mary-Michelle Moore, Library Assistant, Langson Library, UC Irvine / MLIS candidate, Rutgers State University, New Brunswick and Fallon Bleich, Student, Rutgers State University
In our fall poster research we surveyed around 10 librarians associated with museums or libraries who successfully completed a project that featured crowdsourcing, or reaching out to users as an important part of their framing of the project, as a central part of the execution. Using our contacts from the previous poster endeavor we propose to create a small review of about 3-5 of these projects, chosen by who of our previous contacts are willing to speak with us in depth about their experience. We hope that by going over a handful of projects we can show the attendees of the conference the way a few projects were conducted and perhaps see some similarities between how crowdsourcing projects for libraries have worked in the past. Most of the technology we saw in our previous poster research was open source survey-style software that should make for an interesting hands on presentation or poster.
Pinterest As More Than a Collection of Images
Shannon Lane, MLIS Candidate, University of California, Los Angeles
The Pinterest platform is most often used for collecting recipes, craft ideas and event planning, but Pinterest can also be more than that. Pinterest offers the unique opportunity to market your library, or institution, with a series of curated images arranged on themed boards of your choosing. With Pinterest, every item you pin, re-pin or upload can be linked back to your institutions web resources. Not only will this drive more traffic to your web resources, but it will also make your collections and resources available to those who may stumble upon your pins on Pinterest before they think to visit your homepage. This presentation will take a look at an academic library’s Pinterest page that was created with this model in mind.
Building Interfaces to Digital Collections with Viewshare
Jefferson Bailey, Strategic Initiative Manager, Metropolitan New York Library Council
Viewshare is a free, easy-to-use, web-based software platform developed by the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) of the Library of Congress. Viewshare enables collection managers, users, and anyone working with digital content to create multiple, dynamic interfaces that allow new ways of seeing and navigating digital collections. Featuring a simple drag-and-drop interface, multiple tools for managing and enhancing collection data, and an iterative design processes for building visualizations, Viewshare allows for non-technical users to work with the often heterogeneous metadata of cultural heritage organizations. The views created with Viewshare both empower the discovery and understanding of trends and patterns within digital collections and also can be used to quickly prototype collection data for potential use in other discovery and exhibition systems. Most importantly, Viewshare capitalizes on the affordances of richly cataloged items and the unique and detailed contextual knowledge of collection managers to enable the creation of interactive interfaces that form a bridge between curatorial understanding and users' exploratory, generative behavior.
Expanding Zotero's Image Universe: Building translators to harvest our digital collections
Alexander Watkins, Assistant Professor / Art & Architecture Librarian, University of Colorado Boulder
Beyond citation management, Zotero can be a powerful tool for gathering and organizing images. Users can already pull data and image files from sites like Flickr and Wikimedia Commons. But Zotero's open source and extensible nature makes it possible to expand its repertory of sites with a little bit of coding called a translator. Using a program called Scaffold, translators can be built by librarians with only minimal training. These translators can expand the universe of images and metadata found in digital collections that can be harvested by Zotero users.
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