Raising the Tech Bar at Your Library: Improving Services to Meet User Needs

Taylor, Nick D. Raisingthe Tech Bar at Your Library: Improving Services to Meet User Needs. Libraries Unlimited, 2017. ISBN: 978-1-4408-4496-6. 

From establishing tech centers to conducting tech training and providing one-on-one technology assistance, coding classes, and after-school programs, this guide shows you how to make your library the go-to place for technology learning.This book explains how librarians can capitalize on the growing interest and need of patrons for help with technology by expanding their library's tech services to build community engagement and support.

Keeping up with technology is more critical and difficult than ever. This challenge exists not only for library staff but for their patrons as well. Today's librarians are often barraged with increasingly complex questions from their patrons about technology—from loading eBooks onto their readers to helping resurrect dead laptops. Why not capitalize on this opportunity and transform your library into a first-stop, go-to resource for your community's tech needs?

Raising the Tech Bar at Your Library: Improving Services to Meet User Needs demonstrates a variety of ways to expand library services to better serve your community, including how to establish tech bars and tech centers, provide tech training and one-on-one tech help, host drop-in demos, and create a coding "dojo." The book covers after-school programs, makerspaces, and embedded librarianship as well. The authors draw on their personal experience to offer a practical blueprint for launching your tech initiative, starting with the preliminary steps of evaluating community needs and getting administrative and public buy-in to obtaining funding, training non-tech staff, setting up and launching your program, and evaluating the services you've established. The book ends with a look to the future that supplies provocative and exciting ideas of how libraries with innovative, tech-focused leadership can push the edge even further. This book serves a wide audience—all public librarians as well as library administrators, those who work in IT departments as well as adult or youth services, and reference librarians who are interested in expanding into this important and exciting area.

Features:

• Offers librarians a new way to meet diverse users' needs and build community support
• Provides librarians with a variety of ways—suited to different sizes and types of libraries—to expand their tech services
• Presents practical guidelines that lead readers through a step-by-step process to reach their goals
• Supplies guidance derived from the authors' personal experiences and those of their colleagues that illustrate the directives and clearly identify both what to do and mistakes to avoid

Managing the Digital You: Where and How to Keep and Organize Your Digital Life

Condron, Melody. Managing the Digital You: Where and How to Keep and Organize Your Digital Life. Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. ISBN: 978-1-4422-7887-5.

Managing the Digital You: Where and How to Keep and Organize Your Digital Life is a much-needed guide for those struggling with how to manage and preserve their digital items. Starting with a values assessment, this book helps readers identify what items are important to them personally so that they can effectively prioritize their time and effort. Covering multimedia, correspondence, legacy planning, password protection, photos, non-digital documents, financial and legal documents, and even social media archiving, this comprehensive text addresses how to get started and how to develop a plan for managing existing and future items.


Features include: 

• Value assessment exercises to help readers identify what is a preservation priority to them personally
• Best practices for managing digital financial and legal documents
• How to save things from multiple devices, as well as social media sites
• Recommendations for scheduling maintenance activities and automating backup
• Guidelines for creating a personal management plan so that users are prepared to handle new and existing documents, photos, and other digital material for ongoing access

After reading this short primer, readers will be ready to:

1. better organize and identify what they already have in a digital form,
2. have a personal plan for knowing what to discard and what to retain,
3. know how to digitize papers, photographs, voicemail,
4. preserve email and social media postings, and
5. set up a workable long-term file naming and organizational structure.

Putting Teens First in Library Services

Braun, L. W., & Peterson, S. (2017). Putting Teens First in Library Services: A Road Map. Chicago, IL: Young Adult Library Services Association.

Implementing innovative teen services in libraries requires that library staff learn and adapt with their communities. Using core concepts outlined in YALSA’s The Future of Library Services for and With Teens: A Call to Action report as a spring-board, this publication takes a deep dive into the theory and practice behind meaningful, cutting-edge teen programs and services with contributions from diverse leaders in the field including front-line practitioners, managers, and researchers. From novice to expert, readers will explore the knowledge and information that they need in order to design a relevant and sustainable strategy, which will improve the lives of the teens that they serve.(book description)

Creative Instructional Design: Practical Applications for Librarians

Creative Instructional Design: Practical Applications for Librarians, edited by Brandon K. West, Kimberly D. Hoffman, and Michelle Costello. ACRL, 2017. 978-0-8389-8929-6.

Publisher's Description

With an explosion of accessible information online and students feeling more and more independent in their searching skills and information needs, libraries are shifting to user-centered models. With this shift comes a need for librarians to transform the focus of the library from a great repository of material into a service-centric, one-stop research and learning shop for patrons. These changes are requiring librarians to define the library by the services it can provide, especially innovative ones, such as publishing services, scholarly communications, and project management. Instructional design can help librarians craft and assess these new and innovative services, including teaching information literacy, developing online content, and designing programs and outreach initiatives in a targeted and mindful way.

Creative Instructional Design: Practical Applications for Librarians explores the major overarching themes that show why instructional design is so impactful for academic librarians—intentionality, collaboration, and engagement—and provides you with extensive examples of how librarians are applying the theoretical perspectives of instructional design in practical ways. The book examines ways in which librarians are using instructional design principles to inform, construct, or evaluate information literacy initiatives; online library instruction and services; and programming and outreach efforts. Instructional design provides a way for instructors, trainers, and educators to both approach instruction creation systematically, and evaluate how it has been effective and how it can be improved.

Regardless of the instructional format, from classes to workshops to videos to worksheets, instructional design strives to ensure that potential learning gains by students are maximized and that the instruction is evaluated for improvement in future iterations.

More Information
See the publisher's website for Table of Contents and information about the editors.

So You Want to Be an Academic Library Director

Harris, Colleen S. So You Want to Be an Academic Library Director. ALA Editions, 2017. ISBN: 978-0-8389-1496-0

Description
This collection of essays offers a starting point from which academic library directors and aspirants can learn about various leadership skills and then plan their own professional development accordingly.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1   

Navigating Institutional Culture: Building Bridges and Not Burning Them
by Peg Seiden and Eleanor Mitchell

Chapter 2   

The Art of Asking: Communicating Expectations within Your Library
by Samantha Schmehl Hines

Chapter 3   

Collaboration in Connecticut Public Higher Education Libraries
by Patricia S. Banach

Chapter 4   

The Sum of Its Parts: Building Teamwork in the Modern Academic Library Environment
by Emy Nelson Decker

Chapter 5   

Iterative Strategic Planning: Lessons Learned in the Trenches
Bradford Lee Eden

Chapter 6   

So, You Find Yourself Supervising Faculty Librarians: What Now?
by Jonathan Miller

Chapter 7   

It’s Always Personal: Developing an Awareness of Employment Law
by Kim Clarke

Chapter 8   

Facilities for the Director: Communication and Process
Theresa Liedtka and Virginia Cairns

Chapter 9   

Library Safety and Security
by Lisa Beinhoff

Chapter 10   

Why Shared Governance Is Both the Worst and Best Model for Decision-Making in Libraries
by Gary Fitsimmons

Chapter 11   

Relationships with Stakeholders
by Patricia Tully

Chapter 12   

Reframing Community Relations: Four Perspectives on a Children’s Book Event
by Adam Murray

Chapter 13   

Cultural Diversity Programming at Academic Libraries: Skills for Success
by Christopher Shaffer