This was my first time attending the LibTech Conference at Macalester College in St. Paul. The two keynote speakers presented topics that many of us don’t even realize or think about. Sarah T. Roberts discussed the many issues associated with Social Media and Bergis Jules shared the ethics of collection, use, and access to web and social media archival content.
As a rural Public School Media Specialist, all the responsibility of managing the library and technology lies on the librarian so attending the sessions was very beneficial to my program. The first session I attended was about rebuilding a library website in one month flat by Stewart Van Cleve. He shared the do’s and don’ts of making the library website successful. A couple ideas were to not build features that you can’t maintain, and patrons find tutorials very helpful. In the next session Mary Wussow presented “Tech in the Suburbs” giving many great ideas for makerspace or tech activities. The last one for the day was “Cool Tools: Free Apps for Organizing and Collaborating in Your Library.” Many of the ideas would be more useful for larger libraries with more employees.
Day 2 the first session was “Creating Future Ready Media Centers.” Amy Carney shared her experience of rebuilding two different libraries. One she had lots of funding and the other she was limited financially. Some great ideas were shared of trends that are changing the dynamics of today’s libraries. The last session was on how to polish your web portal and promote your library. Some ideas to remember were to check all cliks quarterly, homepages don’t store content but should point to content and have the least amount on the homepage, and to choose common fonts (using no more than 2 fonts), and to watch colors used.
I had received a LibTech scholarship and Sammie scholarship to attend this conference (Thank You) and came home with many new ideas to incorporate into my schools library.
