Amigos 2014 Annual Member Conference

Maintaining balance in everything we do is difficult. It is a fragile thing. It’s something we have to work at all the time: balancing our own practice, technology and the human touch, services and outreach. How do we find balance? We must always keep working to be there, to be present, to be at the edge of what’s happening, and to be very visible while focusing on people, not technology, not the collection. Those are merely tools.

This session will explore how implementing self-checkout stations in your library can allow you to allocate resources towards creating new service opportunities. Learn how one branch of the Mid-Continent Public Library system using a Customer Centered Transaction Model is balancing service in-house with providing service throughout the community.

This session will address how to balance the traditional library functions (collections, services, etc.) with a more inclusive concept of the complete, balanced information experience. The speaker suggests that librarians can learn from and work with museums, other cultural institutions, and even theme parks about complete, immersive, worthwhile experiences.

At the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) Library, technical services librarians and technology support staff are encouraged to participate in information literacy instruction, work a few hours a week at the reference desk, or even teach whole sections of UTEP’s freshman seminar. This presentation will address the philosophy behind these crossover roles and how we developed this model. We’ll talk about how we balance our time and training to include teaching duties in our technical services schedules. Finally, we’ll review the benefits to students and staff when technical services staff participate in teaching.

Bobbie and Howard propose to balance the opportunity for continuing education to library support staff in often under served rural libraries with their short course titled: TLC: Technology literacy course, a little TLC goes a long way.

For years, the Coates Library at Trinity University has collected detailed usage statistics, but this valuable data was not reviewed on a consistent basis and most librarians did not know where to look for the data. In my first few months as the new E-Content Analysis and Assessment Librarian, I became overwhelmed by the amount of data I was pulling and distraught over how to organize the many reports I was to provide to the librarians and administrators. It quickly became apparent to me that I would need to get it together and timeline the reports. Not only would this help me organize all the work I was doing, but more importantly help the library to anticipate when data would need to be reviewed and why. Establishing an E-Content Statistics Schedule for the year, allowed me to prioritize my responsibilities so that I could balance gathering statistics with all of my other E-Content duties!

The objective of this discussion is to share our methods for organizing usage data as well as help others to start thinking about creating a timeline for all of the data reports that are often required and useful. I will be sharing the schedule with them as well as providing attendees with any usage data templates, on the schedule, that they may want to see.

Audience members will be asked to consider some of the following questions: what data needs to be reviewed consistently, how often does the data need to be reviewed, who will collect the data, who will review the data, and what is the purpose of the data. Having an E-Content Statistics schedule for the year can help provide more powerful and meaningful reports that will enable a more strategic approach to future library planning and purchasing.

George and Jennifer will discuss the importance of knowing your community and their needs in order to effectively connect the library to the community. They will give you tips and ideas that you can immediately apply to public library community advocacy and engagement in your local community.

Library Instruction frequently devolves into quick-talking sales pitches as we rush to cover everything a student needs to know to effectively complete an assignment using library resources. While students need a familiarity with a wide range of library services and materials, it is unrealistic to try to cover everything, and library experience varies greatly within a single class. Pairing face to face instruction with online material can turn these encounters into a manageable encounter: focusing on the assignment in a workshop environment, and providing links to additional material. This session uses two examples of flipped instruction to illustrate these principles.

Whether establishing a career, raising young children, assisting aging parents, or working through poor health, all of us face challenges throughout our careers. Based on real-life examples, this session will provide tips and advice on how to thrive when facing challenges from work and personal life.

Technology is constantly changing – so much so that it is difficult to keep up.

What did you miss during the past year? Find out – we’ll discuss what’s new, what’s different . . . and what’s surprising!

Christina will discuss new services and procedures that have been implemented at the St. Louis County Library's (SLCL) Reference Department in the past few years and how these changes impacted library staff. The methods used to provide training and gain staff support will be covered for specific initiatives including online eCourses, SLCL's Mind Your Business Lecture Series, and roving reference. Chris will also discuss challenges and lessons learned.

Copyright law is like a gate between creators and users of protected works. If the gate is closed too tightly, there will be very little interaction between the two; copyrighted works may be strongly protected by the tight gate, but they will also be minimally used for the same reason. If the gate is open too wide, the result is a commons, with the accompanying tragedy. It is only when we find just the right spot, balancing the needs of creators and users, that copyright can function to achieve its purpose: Encouraging creation and innovation.

For users, such as libraries, fair use is the essential tool for maintaining that balance. In the digital realm, however, a powerful movement among copyright owners has declared war on fair use. Find out what’s happening, where libraries stand right now, and what the library community must do to ensure our continuing ability to provide access to information to the American public – to maintain the balance.

Academic Libraries today need to be aware of the different wants and needs of their customers, the students and faculty that are on and off campus. Each customer group has different requirements. Students, who may be living with other people, need a meeting place and a space for quiet study. The faculty want books and journals for their research. Students need easy access to information and faculty want all the information they need to be in the library. This sets up a competition for scarce resources in today’s economy and libraries need to be able to strike a balance between the two customer groups. This session discusses how to weed collections so more space can be created for the students, how to keep the faculty happy by ensuring they have what they want to support their research, and how to provide for both with a limited budget.

We talk about collections all the time. How to build and share them. How to provide access. How to enlist the community in selecting. How to prove the value of collections. How to use collection statistics. We even talk about collections that are hidden and how to get rid of the ones we no longer need. What we infrequently discuss is how to get community members connected with the collections. A hot topic of conversation, particularly in the design of work environments, is how to create collisions that lead to good outcomes.

In this plenary session Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian at Temple University, will share insights into why we need to start talking about designing our libraries, both physical and virtual, with engineered serendipity in mind. As the print-to-digital shift accelerates librarians will need to balance futuristic information access with the preservation of traditional browsing. If the whole point of collections is to facilitate interactions with discovery, research and learning, then we have to come up with better ways to design it into the library experience.