WiLSWorld Conference—July 24-25, 2013
The Pyle Center
702 Langdon Street
Madison, WI
Thanks to all of you who attended the WiLSWorld conference! We had a great couple of days, and we’ll be sharing presentations soon. Keep an eye on this space!
Wednesday 7/24
Keynote
Focused Innovation — Slides
Joan Frye Williams
Whether you see the wealth of new technologies as a candy store to be savored or a minefield to be navigated, sooner or later you’ll need to decide which innovative opportunities to pursue. Library consultant and futurist Joan Frye Williams offers practical advice for sizing up your needs, resources, culture, and readiness, and matching your situation to the kinds of projects that will be a good fit for your organization. There’s no need to chase every trend, and no point in making the work of innovation much harder than it needs to be. Learn how you can apply simple criteria up front to focus your efforts and greatly improve your likelihood of success.
Three Concurrent Sessions
A Conversation With Joan Frye Williams
Gathering Feedback from Users
Josh Morrill, UW-Madison
This session will provide a broad perspective on gathering user feedback and is intend as a complement to the “Testing and Tuning the User Experience” session later today. Josh will share tools and techniques to gather feedback from users. Participants will have the opportunity to ask questions about their own projects.
Large-scale Image Digitization: The Milwaukee Polonia Project — Slides
Ann Hanlon and Michael Doylen, UW-Milwaukee
Digitization of archival holdings is an often fraught enterprise, pitting the user perception of instant access to complete holdings against the realities of fragile materials, time-consuming image capture processes, and resource-consuming metadata workflows. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries have been tackling those issues in a project aimed at digitizing a collection of nearly 35,000 images, including approximately 27,000 glass plate negatives, and making them available online in less than 18 months. Michael Doylen and Ann Hanlon will discuss the Milwaukee Polonia project and the novel “rail-system” that has been used to safely and efficiently guide these fragile materials through the digitization workflow, how they have been able to re-use existing metadata to minimally describe the images at the item-level, and plans to crowd-source more extensive metadata by encouraging tagging and comments.
Three Concurrent Sessions
Managing Digital Content Over Time — Slides & Handouts
Sarah Grimm, Wisconsin Historical Society, Emily Pfotenhauer, Wisconsin Library Service (WiLS)
As the volume of information that exists in digital form continues to grow, digital preservation—the active management of digital content over time to ensure ongoing access—becomes an essential part of any library’s approach to records management. In 2010 the Library of Congress created the Digital Preservation Outreach and Education (DPOE) program to provide educational resources for digital preservation and promote collaboration across the digital preservation community. Sarah Grimm and Emily Pfotenhauer have completed DPOE Train-the-Trainer workshops and are two of the 45 certified DPOE trainers currently active across the United States.
This session will introduce the core concepts of the first two modules of the DPOE Digital Preservation Baseline Curriculum. The first part of the session will help you to understand and identify the digital content you have and how to create a scalable inventory. The second part of the session will give you the tools to help you determine which portion of that content is your responsibility to preserve.
EduCore: A Tool for Mobile Information Apps Development for Libraries and Schools
Joel Herron, UW-Whitewater
Mobile applications are a great way to add another layer of engagement with your community. For non-profits like libraries and schools, the cost to build and maintain apps for each platform has been a high of a price to pay.
The goal of EduCore is to provide a lower cost of entry into the mobile space. Including features like news and event feeds, maps and social integrations our hopes are to allow organizations to be able to deliver applications easily and at the same time empower those with more technology resources to build additional features into their apps.
Joel will be focusing on why UW-Oshkosh and UW-Milwaukee choose the path they did, what EduCore is and how your organization can leverage it to create a high quality mobile experience.
What do students REALLY think about eTextbooks?
Josh Morrill, UW-Madison
During the Spring and Fall 2012 semesters UW-Madison and four peer institutions participated in a “quick turnaround” eText pilot based on a business model adopted by Indiana University’s eText initiative. The pilot was sponsored by Internet2 and involved McGraw Hill, an eTextbook provider, and Courseload, a software company. The Internet2 contractual agreement involved a $20,000 flat fee, which enabled UW-Madison to provide free eTextbooks to over 700 students in five different courses. This session will explore some of the more pertinent (and in some cases surprising) aspects of the student evaluation outcomes. We will explore what features matter to students, how much would they pay for an eTextbook, and overall what their preference is in terms of eText versus paper textbooks.
Three Concurrent Sessions
Game design in the library
Gabriella Anton, UW-Madison
Interest in playing and making games is increasingly more prevalent in youth. Studio K, an online game design curriculum and community, provides the opportunity for engaging youth in academically-oriented, interest-driven content in a safe environment. This presentation will explore the recent game design initiative featuring Studio K in local libraries. Practices for engaging, supporting, and encouraging healthy youth participation in this programming will be discussed.
Digital Public Library of America: Minnesota’s Contribution — Slides
Jason Roy, University of Minnesota—Twin Cities Libraries
The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) launched in April 2013, providing a window onto America’s history and culture through its digital libraries. The Minnesota Digital Library (MDL) is one of six U.S. state and regional digital libraries selected as a “service hub” to the DPLA. This discussion will profile the DPLA initiative, its inspirations, and initial set of services; and then proceed to describe how the digitization of Minnesota’s collections as well as several new initiatives now beginning will help to shape and tell Minnesota’s national story.
The Institutional Repository and Preservation/
Testing and Tuning the User Experience
Bruce Barton, David Lee, Jessie Nemec, Scott Prater
UW-Madison Shared Development Group
For managers, archivists, faculty liaisons, and anyone else curious about policy and models for encouraging digital preservation, here’s a look ahead to something we’re watching. The Digital Preservation Network being implemented now by HathiTrust, Stanford, and several other players will provide dark preservation storage for the sorts of institutional assets we now place into Institutional Repositories. We’ll describe how we’re thinking about preservation and an expanded role for the IR in managing research data.
In a talk aimed at developers, system administrators, and others who like to get their hands dirty, we will describe tools and techniques for evaluating and improving our users’ experience of our web sites and discovery interface. The discussion will look at measuring performance, web analytics, a/b testing, and other techniques.
Thursday 7/25
Member Breakfast: Results from the member breakfast exercise about WiLS services/library challenges
Keynote
What does a library hacker look like? Reflections on technology, gender, and the future of libraries — PowerPoint slides
Bess Sadler, Stanford University
What is a hacker and what does it mean to be a library hacker? What does it mean to identify as a hacker, as a librarian, and as a woman, in a world where technology is so often constructed as male and librarianship so often constructed as female? This talk will examine the way popular culture depicts women as hackers (e.g., The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), and contrast that with what we actually know about women who engage in this work. Finally, this talk will highlight some of the real world library hackers who are re-imagining librarianship as a field that can embrace innovation and technology without losing its sense of values, ethic of service, or tradition of strong female leadership.
Three Concurrent Sessions
A Conversation With Bess Sadler
Hackerspaces and Libraries — Prezi presentation
Chris Meyer, Sector67, Nate Clark and Trent Miller, Madison Public Library
Madison Public Library and their hometown hackerspace, Sector67, will share their experiences in the effort to bring people together through the act of making. Walk away with a better understanding of the library’s place in the maker movement, and with the tools and knowledge you’ll need to find the money, partners, and participants in your community.
WIWIWILD: WIWIWI: Library Division — Website
Pete Gilbert, Lawrence University
It’s the end of the conference. Your brain is full. Come do some participatory research with The Worldwide Internet Weirdness Institute of Wisconsin. WIWIWI (just say: “Why, Why, Why?”) is a not-for-profit, not-for-real, Very Serious Research Institute (VSRI). The Institute’s Library Division will be sharing their research findings and asking for your help finding the very weirdest the Internet has to offer.