Lead the Change: Transform Your Stack to Drive Circulation

Author Name: Ashley Swinford
Library System: Allegany County Library Systems

Learning Event website:
http://lj.libraryjournal.com/lead-the-change/programs/drive-circulation/#_

Top 3 things learned:

• A library's brand is reading.
• Less people are discovering what to read from browsing a bricks and mortar bookstore
• Libraries are highly trusted
• There is a huge opportunity to bridge the gap and be the trusted place that people browse and discover what to read next

How to implement: 
Our library plans to reflect and design a plan to organize our displays so that they draw patrons back into the stacks, not simply sticking to the front to browse new titles. We also plan to create book
talkers for the stacks to point out some appeal factors and read-a-likes for unknown titles and authors.
Additional learning: We also learned about how to create self-directed pathways through the library as well as the use of social media, email, and bloggers to build our brand.

Lead the Change: Increase Circulation in the Stacks

Author Name: Elizabeth Sell
Library System: Allegany County Library Systems

Top 3 things learned:

• What a 'Walking Path" is and how to set it up in your library.
• Made a 'Display Plan' for my library.
• What a 'Shelf Talker' is and how they can be helpful.

How to implement:
We discussed how just changing where you put things in the library can pull patrons further in which in turn can boost circulation. Changing book displays more often can help patrons find things of interest which they may not have seen otherwise. Placing 'Shelf talkers' in stacks , which can be used to promote read-alikes, give patrons little blurbs using appeal terms to create interest.

Code in Libraries: STEM Kids: Electrical Circuits

Author name: Julie Iden
Library System: Ruth Enlow Library of Garrett County
Date of program: 09/16/2015
Title of Program: STEM Kids- Electrical Circuits

Description of Activities:
I started off the program with a power point presentation on electrical circuits. We discussed electricity, conductors, insulators, the flow of electricity through a circuit, series circuits, and parallel circuits. We used an energy ball to demonstrate electrical circuits. This was not included in our coding kits, but it would make a nice addition to your kit. When you touch the ball's metal strips, the ball lights up and creates sound. We made predictions on whether or not electricity would flow through the human body. We kept adding kids to our human circuit until all fourteen kids were
included in our circuit. If someone broke the connection by letting go of their hands, the ball would stop lighting up and making sounds.

We then divided into two groups. Half of the kids worked independently using the Snap Circuits Jr's. I purchased additional Snap Circuits Jr. kits, so we have a total of five. The children worked in groups of two, and that worked out well. They enjoyed working through the projects in the project guide that came in each Snap Circuits Jr. kit. Some of the older children skipped ahead to more challenging projects. Each group was successful in completing circuits to make lights and sounds and even a flying saucer.

I worked with the other half of the group making squishy circuits. They were able to complete both series and parallel circuits. We had trouble with a few LED's burning up. We were told not to attach the LED's directly to the batteries, and I think that that the LED wires were touching the wires coming from the batteries inside of the play dough. My son said that we needed resistors, but I'm not sure how that would work.

STEM Kids is an hour and a half long, once a month program for children ages 6-13 at the Ruth Enlow Library in Oakland. By using the squishy circuits and the Snap Circuits Jr's. from the coding kit, the children were able to learn a lot about electrical circuits. They were given the opportunity to create many different circuits using several different materials. I liked that they were able to make their own discoveries using the provided materials. The program worked well for both the younger and the older children.

Event Photos: http://www.wmrl.info/sites/default/files/webform/IMG_3325.jpg

Harwood Institute Public Innovators Lab

Detroit, MI
Oct 14-16, 2015

The Harwood Institute has partnered with the American Library Association and the Gate's Libraries Transforming Communities initiative to provide training and tools to help libraries bring positive change to their communities. The Lab was an intense 2 1/2 day training in the Harwood methodology for becoming public innovators.

There are five key areas of the method:
1. Turning Outward
Turning outward makes the community the reference point for everything we do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMfAC-CQlZA&index=2&list=PLGUgHiR-NR_rR8E4EhpxzoOfWB8XdTtPj

2. Understanding My Community
Gaining an understanding of the community and uncovering the underlying issues is found through public knowledge (what everyone knows) as opposed to expert knowledge (what I think is best). Asking the right questions can lead to a deep understanding of shared aspirations and the barriers standing in the way of realizing those aspirations. By sharing your knowledge, you build ownership and allies.

3. Creating Conditions for Change and Aspirations
As you work toward addressing the issues, it is important to identify the stage of the community and its implication for effective action. Communities can generally be grouping into five, often overlapping stages. Trying to do too much too soon is doomed to failure and setback.

4. Deciding on the Right Path
Identify your sphere of influence, and choose the best path to ensure a win.

5. Commitment
Understand your own needs, and make the commitment to stay true to yourself, to take care of yourself, and to identify support for yourself as you do this work.

We (WCFL) have conducted a few community conversations, but previously we were asking what the community would like from the library. This was the wrong question. We will start again by asking "What kind of community do you want?". One thing I realized was that it didn't matter what community the person you are asking has in mind- the attributes of the 'work' community or the 'neighborhood' community or the 'where I live' community were fundamentally the same.  I can see where small changes could have a large ripple effect throughout the community.  We will begin by conducting community conversations with library staff. Hopefully, this will get us off to a positive start.

Cybersecurity Workshop

The ACLS staff was fortunate to be able to attend a workshop dealing with Cybersecurity this morning.  It was presented by Mr. Biser who is a Certified Ethical Hacker.  That means he knows how to get into your computer and take information out of it. Luckily, he works for the police and is on the good side of the hacker world.  He was able to put a little fear into me and my colleagues by letting us know how easy it is for hackers to breach our private computers.  We learned ways to keep our information safe. Some easy ways are to have passwords that are hard to break, and to not download items or click links sent in emails from people we don't know.  I teach computer classes at South Cumberland Library, and I will pass on this information to my students so they can keep safe also.
Thanks!

CONTENTdm Users Group, Nashville, August 2015

Jill Craig, Western Maryland Regional Library.

• Making Maps with the CONTENTdm API, Marcus Ladd, Miami University of Ohio
This was a session on how to build a map of a geographically-oriented collection in CONTENTdm with publicly available PHP and Javascript resources. 

Marcus had a postcard collection of cards from Ohio. His code, which he shared on github, https://github.com/laddmm/CONTENTdm_MAP, uses the address of the image from his CONTENTdm url and that links to an sql table using javascript. This way CONTENTdm api harvests the data and Google maps creates a map using the address to create coordinates. Marcus has additional steps as he described the application as “buggy”. Miami University, Ohio, Bowden Postcards Collection

The question I would have is whether this program would work with our data which does not contain recognizable street addresses. The Confederate dead were buried in locations like “Mrs. Lucketts barn”. In that case I would need to create the lat/long myself, add to the CONTENTdm database  and then use the google api.  There are several other applications where pinpointing the location will be helpful.

• Introduction Data Cleaning and Preservation, Morgan Daniels, Vanderbilt University
My need to clean up data is much less than Tracy’s but I can still see a use for OpenRefine (http://www.openrefine.org/ ), OpenRefine is an open source application that runs through Google.  It adds power to the kinds of  things I have been doing in Excel and makes decisions for you, so instead of having to sort a field, see what the options are, select which is correct, and then search and replace. It would replace all variants for “Hagerstown” for example with the most commonly used term.  I would need to be cautious in using with names that may have been correct at some point, like “Hagers-town” and “Boonesborough” – transcription spellings are unique
and their spellings are unique

CONTENTdm Users Group, Goucher College, May 2015

Jill Craig, Western Maryland Regional Library.

CONTENTdm Users Group, Goucher College, May 2015

Building Order: using free tools and templates to streamline content management workflow

Jennifer K. Galas, University of Scranton

She described a campus with many potential data collectors but no simple way for them to add to a database. They could benefit from the diverse knowledge of the staff and inspire everyone to become a content creator.

Jennifer created a google spreadsheet available on the web for faculty and students to input. Then she utilized two javascripts - Tabletop.js and handlebars.js to create custom scripts.

The result is a collection which includes pages like Gannon Hall, University of Scranton 

She also used mapsheet.js which would be worth investigating to see if it is better than other mapping scripts.

I can see a non-centralized data entry system making it easier for data to be entered in our various libraries or counties. 

Working with Text and PDFs – Geri Ingram

Users expect full-text search-ability across the repository, but will also expect the data to be linked. Linked data will eventually provide the engine for new knowledge creation, for Washington County’s data on Antietam to, in Geri’s term, “become visible in the web-of-things” through worldcat and dpla.

Geri suggested using the metadata templates at page level; compound object level and for PDFs. On the Website Configtool: to suppress display of components of compound objects in search results, which would mean a search would find a word in a compound object and not pull up every single page. This is done by selecting pagetype = PDF 

Materials commonly assembled as compound objects would be Yearbooks, Papers, Postcards, Books.

Metadata can be at a page-level or object level.

I need to try the post card option of a compound object for the postcards we have that have information on the back of the image.  

The State Library of North Carolina Digital Repository has some useful ideas to for making a site more usable and user-friendly. It is a site I will look at again when my backlog is reduced.