Student assistance in conducting small digital projects at Grinnell College has been valuable to the students, the department of Special Collections and Archives, and the Libraries as a whole. Over the course of several recent and ongoing projects, students have been involved in everything from helping to establish a workflow, to choosing the material to scan, to the actual digitization itself. Students are even frequently enthusiastic about publicizing completed projects. By involving students in each step of the projects, Special Collections is provided with much-needed manpower. And the goal is that, in return, students will gain valuable knowledge related to project planning and team coordination, as well as technical and preservation skills and experience. We have found that incorporating students in the earliest stages of a project allows us to help them learn to think in terms of long-range plans, goal setting, and “the Big Picture.” Allowing them to assist in determining what materials can be – or should be – scanned opens up the opportunity to discuss such topics as copyright, intellectual rights, conservation and preservation, and digital preservation. By doing the digitization, students gain experience with current technologies that may be transferable to a future workplace. If you haven’t considered using students in digital projects before, this will be a good venue to explore and discuss this valuable learning experience.
The Beulah Williams is currently working on creating a space for future teachers to have access to new and emerging technologies that are or possibility will be in the classroom once they become professional teachers. The presentation includes a review of literature to show the trends currently in place in academic libraries for technology sandboxes/ makerspaces and will discuss why these spaces are successful in academic libraries. The presenters discuss steps taken by the Library Director and the Electronic Resources Manager to obtain the necessary equipment, and how they gained the support needed from the university community. The presentation concludes with plans for the future of the technology space at both the university level and within the Aberdeen, South Dakota Community as an outreach endeavor.
Designing research guides has recently become an expectation of a large number of librarians. For many of these librarians, creating a guide is their first experience developing content on the Internet. LibGuides, the most popular research guide platform, has many options for changing the navigation and structure of a guide--pages, columns, boxes, tabs, sidebars, and more. These are some of first aspects of LibGuides that librarians encounter. As such, they tend to dominate much of librarians’ thinking about research guides. Indeed, the majority of literature on research guides focuses on navigation and the naming and arrangement of various types of content within a guide. What is often forgotten is a thoughtful consideration of the way content is structured within various pages and boxes within a guide. Navigation is important, but it is only one part of the equation.
The average web user spends about three seconds on a web page before deciding if it is relevant. If she can’t tell the page is relevant within that window, she leaves. Guides must make their purpose and contents clear very quickly and allow for easy, rapid scanning through the page body. These principles impact every aspect of the page, from top to bottom: navigation, headings, paragraphs, lists, page layout, and page length.
Library websites are notoriously hard to design. Librarians strive to build effective websites that serve a variety of users but we must blend original, local content with third party tools and interfaces. Standard usability testing helps us design effective sites, but it is costly, time consuming and laborious. In this session, you will learn how to perform a streamlined version of usability testing, allowing rapid iterations of your site designs. Whether you are tweaking your present site or creating a new one, this testing method can be planned, executed and the results reported in days or maybe even hours. Using real world examples, this session will give attendees the tools and hands on experience needed to perform “Pop-up” testing methods in their libraries. Using this process, you will save time, work and money!
