Weeding the Academic Library With Confidence

Instructor: Samantha Hines
Dates: July 1-28, 2013
Credits: 1.5 CEUs
Price: $175

All libraries need some regular weeding, but many of us don’t know where to start. An important but often overlooked part of collection development, deaccessioning materials is a vital way to keep your library’s collection useful for your institution. This four-week, asynchronous online course will provide, through readings and exercises, guidance on how to focus a library’s collection and identify where to prune and what to keep. We will explore how to keep faculty (moderately) happy during the weeding process, and what to do with the downsized materials once the decision to deaccession has been made. Students will develop principles on maintaining a manageable library collection during the course which will guide their institution well into the future, while also learning about the mechanics involved in a weeding project.

Samantha Schmehl Hines received her MS in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2003. In 2004 she was hired as the Social Science Librarian by the Mansfield Library at The University of Montana-Missoula and is currently the Distance Education Coordinator and Head Librarian for the Missoula College campus of The University of Montana. She writes and presents widely on issues of online library services, information literacy instruction, and library middle management, and is the author of Productivity for Librarians (2010, Chandos).

Visit Library Juice Academy for more.

Andrew Walsh is a well-known academic librarian who is the author of numerous publications relating to library instruction. He is the instructor for a Library Juice Academy course offered next month, called “Getting More Active Learning Into Your Teaching.” Andrew agreed to be interviewed here to give people more of an idea of what the course will cover, his background as an instructor, and a little bit about his other interests.

Rebecca Blakiston is an Instructional Services Librarian and the Website Product Manager at the University of Arizona Libraries in Tucson, Arizona. She is the organizer of our 6-course certificate program in user centered design for library websites. She agreed to do this interview to give people a better sense of what is involved in this certificate program – what it covers, who would benefit from it, etc.

Martin Wallace is a Science & Engineering Librarian at the University of Maine, Orono, and serves as Maine’s only representative to the Patent and Trademark Resource Center (PTRC), a program administered by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. He is serving his third term as secretary of the Patent and Trademark Resource Center Association (PTRCA). He is teaching a class for Library Juice Academy next month in patent searching, and he agreed to do an interview to help people gain a sense of what they will learn in the class, as well as what got him to the point of teaching it for us and what he is about as a person.

Cody Hennesy is the E-Learning Librarian at the University of California, Berkeley. He has coded a variety of academic library sites and tools and recently developed the front-end for the online resource maintained by Library Juice Press, Alternatives in Print: A Directory of Alternative Publishers and Critical Periodicals. He is going to be teaching a class in Drupal for libraries next month with Library Juice Academy. He agreed to do an interview to give people a clearer idea of what will be covered in the class, as well as a bit about him and his background and interests.

Debra Lucas-Alfieri is the Head of Reference and Interlibrary Loan at D’Youville College in Buffalo, NY, and is teaching a class for Library Juice Academy next month on Marketing the Library in the 21st Century. She agreed to do an interview to give people a better idea about what they stand to learn in the class, her background, and other interests.

In this 6-course certificate program, you will gain competency as a coder in XML and RDF-based systems that create, transform, manage, and disseminate content and metadata. Typically, these are the structures at the heart of content management systems, repositories, and digital libraries. Topics covered include XML fundamentals, XPath, DTDs and Schemas, standard markup languages, XSLT and Xquery, the semantic web, RDFa and RDFa Lite, RSS, ontologies and linked data, and the SPARQL semantic query language and protocol.

Courses in the series:

1. Introduction to XML

2. Transforming and Querying XML: An introduction to the XSLT and Xquery

3. Introduction to the Semantic Web

4. RDFa1.1 (RDFa and RDFa Lite) and RSS

5. Ontologies and Linked Data

6. The SPARQL semantic query language and protocol – the Semantic Web in action

These courses are four-weeks in duration and taught asynchronously.

These courses work best if taken in sequence, as the sequence builds on knowledge gained, but we have no formal prerequisites in place. If you need to take them out of sequence, feel free to contact us about your situation.

The cost for each course is $175, but you can register for all six courses in the program at once and receive a 10% discount.

More Information

In this 6-course certificate program, you will learn the fundamentals of user experience (UX) and how to apply user-centered strategies to library websites and beyond. The program begins by teaching you the key concepts of UX design and how to employ them in your website projects. Next, you will learn the ins and outs of information architecture: how to structure and organize your content so that it is both discoverable and navigable in the easiest way possible. The next two courses will give you the tools to continually get feedback on your website through usability testing and other research methods. You will then learn how to better write for the web so that once your users discover your content, they can both understand it and act on it. Finally, you will learn how you can create a website content strategy, so that from that point forward all your content will be useful, usable, and findable. All together, these courses cover a breadth of topics that will equip you with the skills necessary to create, manage, and sustain library websites that provide an excellent user experience.

Courses in the series:

Designing a Usable Website (Concepts of User-Centered Design)
Instructor: Carolyn Ellis

Information Architecture: Designing Navigation for Library Websites
Instructor: Susan Teague-Rector

Do-It-Yourself Usability Testing
Instructor: Rebecca Blakiston

Beyond Usability Testing: Other Research Methods
Instructor: Sonali Mishra

Writing for the Web
Instructor: Nicole Capdarest and Rebecca Blakiston

Developing a Website Content Strategy
Instructor: Rebecca Blakiston

These courses need not be taken in sequence for the purposes of earning the Certificate in User Experience, and none have prerequisites. Contact us for more information.

I have just interviewed Ray Schwartz. Ray is a systems librarian at the William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey. He frequently presents on topics relating to the use of many forms of electronic transactional data and datamining. He is teaching a course for Library Juice Academy next month called, “Collecting and Evaluating Electronic Transactions from Library Services.” He agreed to do an interview here to give people a better idea about what will be covered in the class and where he is coming from.

I have just interviewed Beth Knazook, an image archivist who has worked for the Ryerson University Archives & Special Collections and as the Photo Archivist for the Stratford Festival of Canada. Her expertise is in photographic preservation and photographic collection management, and that is the subject of her introductory course for Library Juice Academy next month, “What Do I Do With All These Pictures? Getting Started With Digital Image Collections.” Beth agreed to be interviewed to give people a better sense of what they will learn from the class and about her background as an instructor.

Library Juice Academy is starting a webinar series on “Creative Solutions in Academic Libraries,” and this is a call for presenters.

There is no shortage of discussion about “problems faced by academic libraries” at the big scale, regarding trends in higher education and technology, where the approach to these problems is mainly a question of strategic planning. There is less attention to the small scale problems that academic librarians solve in the process of adapting services and processes to a changing environment or to new plans. These solutions to small scale problems can be in the realm of technological kludges or hacks, organizational adjustments, creative ideas in outreach, procedural changes, questioning and revision of “the way we do things” in a specific sense, recognition of areas where “what didn’t work before” can work now, time management strategies, and others.

We are looking for presenters for a series of monthly webinars where academic librarians will share a creative solution that may be helpful to librarians in other institutions. These hour-long webinars will likely include two 20-minute presentations and a period for discussion, with presentations grouped by theme. Presentations may be by individuals or groups. There will be monetary compensation for presenters based on the number of paying attendees.

If you have an idea for a presentation that would fit this webinar series, contact Rory Litwin at rory@libraryjuiceacademy.com, and we can discuss it.

Thanks, and I look forward to your ideas.

I have just interviewed Marcus Banks, who is the Director of Library/Academic & Instructional Innovation at Samuel Merritt University. He has a strong interest in new and alternative methods of quantitatively assessing scholarly work, and that is roughly the subject area of the class he is teaching for Library Juice Academy next month: Digital Scholarship: New Metrics, New Modes. Marcus agreed to be interviewed here, to give people a better sense of what his class is about and what they will learn from it.

I have just interviewed Emily Drabinski, instructor for the upcoming Library Juice Academy course, Working Faster, Working Smarter: Productivity Strategies for Librarians. Emily is also co-editor of Critical Library Instruction: Theories & Methods (Library Juice Press, 2010), and edits a book series from Litwin Books/Library Juice Press. Our interview gives a clear description of what her course is about and gets into some of her other interests. Always good talking to Emily.

I have just done an interview with Aliqae Geraci, instructor for the upcoming Library Juice Academy course, Team-Based Work Structures and Productivity. The interview gives the background to the workshop and the instructor, and gets a bit into her other interests.

As a personal note, judging from my previous experience in libraries and what I learned from interviewing Aliqae, I think a lot of library organizations could benefit from sending a librarian or two to this workshop.

Library Juice Academy Webinar Series:
What’s New with Gary Price

In these fast-paced sessions Gary Price shares a handful of the latest and most useful web resources, tools, and search techniques he’s been posting and sharing on LJ’s infoDOCKET.

Plus, each session focuses on a special topic loaded with resources and discussion.

Topics include online privacy and security, current awareness tools, real time information sources, ethical issues for the 21st Century librarian, personal information archiving, and online productivity tools.

The goal of each webinar is to:

• Teach you about several resources and tools you were unaware of when the program started;
• Give you resources and techniques to share with your colleagues;
• Provide ideas for tools and topics to share your users;
• Make you a more well-rounded info professional.

Of course, Gary will welcome questions and comments as each session progresses.

Webinars are $25 per session for a single seat, or purchase a pack of ten seats for $150 (good for simultaneous viewings by multiple people at an institution or by a single person over multiple future sessions, i.e. a subscription).

Gary Price is a librarian, author, and an online information analyst based in suburban Washington, DC. He is the co-founder and co-editor of infoDOCKET and FullTextReports.com, and a contributing editor at Search Engine Land. Price is a frequent speaker at professional and trade conferences, a contributor to Searcher and Information Today, and co-author (with Chris Sherman) of The Invisible Web, published by CyberAge Books.