In the 2017/2018 fiscal year, Northshore Technical Community College received grants from LCTCS and the Board of Regents/Northwestern University. The main goals were to: find open resources, develop OER courses and prepare them for sharing with LCTCS colleges system-wide. Margaret Keller, Director of Library Services, and Kimberly Roberts, NTCC Grant Coordinator, and an online instructor, partnered with six faculty to create four OER courses, with three taught in the spring of 2018 and one scheduled to be taught in the fall 2018 semester. Mrs. Keller and Dr. Roberts will share the knowledge and experience gained from the implementation of these two grants and provide an OER toolbox that can be used by librarians in either implementing or assisting in creating OER courses.
The LOUIS Team often assists libraries in troubleshooting access issues with electronic resources. Sometimes there is a simple solution AND sometimes the solutions are more complex and require vendor intervention. This session will provide an overview on how to go about RESOLVING issues, including common error messages and what they mean, first steps you can take to get started, and what documentation to provide those assisting you. Lisa and Jaime will highlight case studies from support tickets, questions posted to discussion lists, and audience participation!
This session will be an overview of free or nearly free software and tools that enable writing, editing, brainstorming and note-taking, alone and collaboratively. Plain text writing software such as Sublime Text are not just for coders, as they have features that can assist all types of writing. Markdown is a markup language that allows writers to quickly format simple documents, and in conjunction with Pandoc, can be used to generate professional looking documents in multiple formats. Git, GitHub and Google provide version control and allow multiple writers to work on documents simultaneously. Organizing thoughts visually can be accomplished with mind mapping software, Freemind, and Trello.
As part of my work as the FDLP Coordinator at Sims Memorial Library, I offer specialized reference and instruction services involving government information. A frequent area concerns finding statistics from government sources, particularly in support of a nursing community assessment project. In this session, I will share some of my lessons learned from these experiences not only with finding the statistics themselves but with helping students learn how to find, to evaluate, and to use the information.
SirsiDynix's Enterprise interface is now active for all LOUIS libraries, so there must be plenty of questions, ideas, and concerns about the ways libraries can use this new and powerful discovery tool to improve their own search experiences. This session provides an opportunity to learn about some of the things that LOUIS libraries have been doing to take Enterprise beyond the out-of-the-box default settings to create unique, customized solutions. This session is for anyone who uses or teaches others how to use their library's catalog; anyone who works in system administration, cataloging, electronic resources, reference, or circulation. Join a panel of experienced Enterprise users to learn what you can do with your library's Enterprise set-up. Part presentation, part roundtable discussion, this session will provide all users with an opportunity to ask questions, share ideas, and learn more about using Enterprise effectively.
The ALA describes equity, diversity, and inclusion as the fundamental values of the organization and its members, identifying diversity as one of its Key Action Areas. To that end, the ALA employs a social justice framework "to ensure the inclusion of diverse perspectives within our profession and association." This is all well and good, but how does that assertion apply to patrons? And how does it translate to practice for both the profession and our patrons? How do we as librarians advocate for our patrons and within our professional practice with specific emphasis on inclusion? This panel discussion will tackle various dimensions of the topic of inclusion, sharing insights from the New Orleans Information Literacy Collective's summer conference (which will focus on this same topic).
Librarians are no strangers to crises of all sorts. Drug overdoses, tornadoes, domestic violence, and riots have all touched libraries; these are not events that happen in other places. How can librarians, library staff, and library administration across the spectra of libraries – public and academic, school and special, law and medical – ensure and enhance the safety of their patrons and their spaces while preventing or mitigating crises? This panel will seek to explore the many types of crises faced by libraries today, as well as ways of mitigating and preventing such crises.
When we discuss attracting talented individuals to the profession, we focus on discussing both the hard skills (e.g., technological competence) and the soft skills (e.g., the ability to respond to patrons appropriately in reference interviews). A component of soft skills that bears a closer examination, especially during times of stress and flux (as we often face in the state), is emotional intelligence, or EI or EQ. This presentation will define EQ; its status and role in the profession; its importance to management and leadership; and how we can promote and facilitate EQ within our institutions and the profession at large.
In our efforts to (1) better align the missions and goals of the ULM Library and the Computing Center with an eye toward (2) re-shaping the Library to a more collaborative, digital/information commons format, ULM's CIO Tom Hoover, Director of the Library Megan Lowe, and Director of Computing Chance Eppinette visited various academic libraries in south Louisiana. This presentation talks about what we saw and how we've translated that (or plan to) to the ULM Library via collaboration between the Library and Computing.
