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Effective Library Signage: Tips, Tricks, & Best Practices Workshop
Mark Aaron Polger and Amy F. Stempler Item Number: 1541-9212
Effective Library Signage: Tips, Tricks, & Best Practices Workshop
A 90-minute workshop, Thursday, January 5, 2017, 2:30pm Eastern/1:30 Central/12:30 Mountain/11:30am PacificLibrary signage represents the first lines of communication between a library user and the library. Are you doing everything to ensure that your signage is user friendly and inviting? Although we have the best intentions, sometimes our signage can be punitive, contradictory, outdated, or passive aggressive.In this new workshop, Mark Aaron Polger and Amy F. Stempler, library professionals who’ve conducted a four yearlong study at the College of Staten Island, CUNY that involved an extensive signage audit and replacement project, will provide you with the top ten tips to follow when preparing new signage for your library. They will discuss what constitutes “bad” and “good” signage and the importance of developing a signage policy to ensure consistency in design and overall language. Other topics that will be addressed will be placement, ADA compliancy, branding, design, verbiage, and the use of images, language, and font. You’ll come out of this workshop with the best practices to assess your current signage and develop improved signage for your institution.Learning Outcomes
After participating in this workshop, you will be able to:
Identify the best practices when developing new signage
Distinguish and follow the steps involved in coordinating a signage audit
Create a signage policy that is appropriate for your institution
About the Instructors
Mark Aaron Polger is the first year experience librarian and information literacy instructor at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York (CUNY). His responsibilities include promoting library services and resources to first year students and providing library instruction and information literacy classes. Polger’s research interests include library marketing, outreach, and user experience design. He has written and presented on topics ranging from library marketing strategies, faculty outreach, Information Literacy outreach, embedded librarianship, library jargon, and library signage. Polger holds a BA in Sociology from Concordia University, an MA in Sociology from the University of Waterloo, a B.Ed. in adult education from Brock University, and an MLIS from the University of Western Ontario. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in Curriculum, Instruction, and the Science of Learning at SUNY University at Buffalo.
Amy F. Stempler is an associate professor in the library department at the College of Staten Island, CUNY, where she has worked since 2008. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree and Master’s Degree in History from The George Washington University and a Master’s Degree in Library and Information Science Degree from the Pratt Institute. Stempler is currently the coordinator of library instruction, and has written on library signage, Jewish history, Judaica librarianship, and the role of archives in environmental history.
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more on signage for libraries:
Polger, M. A., & Stempler, A. F. (2014). Out with the Old, In with the New: Best Practices for Replacing Library Signage. Public Services Quarterly, 10(2), 67-95. doi:10.1080/15228959.2014.904210
authors’ thesis is that library signs are living documents
Stempler, A. F., & Polger, M. A. (2013). Do You See the Signs? Evaluating Language, Branding, and Design in a Library Signage Audit. Public Services Quarterly, 9(2), 121-135. doi:10.1080/15228959.2013.785881
To be effective, signage must be consistent, concise, and free of jargon and punitive language.
We conducted a short 5 min live session on Facebook Live and Periscope; the first of three mini-series to test the potential of these tools for academic purposes:
Here is the link to the LITA Webinar Facebook Group page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/LitaSocialMediaWebinar/
“Hybrid learning gives us the advantage of having technology available to learn in the way that we’ve grown used to,” says Ms. Pillwein, who is also a Brock University graduate. “In the abnormal psychology course, the online component is mainly tests and quizzes that you can do in your own time. I’ve found that suits my learning style more, as opposed to doing a test in class where you’d have to memorize a lot of terms and concepts.”
Ms. Pillwein also likes that the professor uploads all of her PowerPoint presentations for students to access and review. She feels that helps get the material embedded in her brain more than writing things down word for word during the lecture.
Ms. Hotham finds that the combination of two hours of classroom lecture and then one hour of online activity for the week is an effective way of teaching the material, particularly because it gives students time to take away what has been said and digest it.
After two years of teaching the course with the online component and one year before that of teaching without it, she says the student grades are higher than when she taught only in the classroom.
Ms. Hotham also finds students are more engaged in the discussion the week after doing the online activities because they have more to talk about. Sometimes she posts a video, which then becomes an online discussion.
Patrick Lyons, director of teaching and learning services at Carleton University in Ottawa, visualizes online learning taking many different forms, presenting all kinds of opportunities that could not be delivered any other way. Carleton has a long history offering distance learning, first broadcasting courses on a local cable TV channel in 1978 and then offering the world’s first video podcast of a university credit course in 2006.
Instagram Adds Boomerang, Mention Tags, and Links to Instagram Stories: Instagram introduced two new tools “to help you make your story even more fun, Boomerang and mentions,” and announced that it’s starting “to test links inside some stories.” Boomerang, which “lets you turn everyday moments into something fun and unexpected,” can be selected as an additional format option under the Record button. Boomerang records and stitches together “a burst of photos into a mini video that plays forward and backward.” Users can also tag and mention people in stories just as they do in Instagram captions and comments. These updates for Instagram Stories are available as part of Instagram version 9.7 available for iOS in the Apple App Store. It’s also available on Android and Windows.
Facebook Opens Sponsored Messages on Messenger: As part of a larger Messenger update “designed to provide visibility into optimal entry points, enhance existing conversations and enable you to build better overall experiences,” Facebook made sponsored messages within Messenger generally available to all advertisers. According to Facebook, “sponsored messages give businesses the ability to send targeted updates, information about promotions, reminders and other relevant messages.” All Facebook advertisers can now reach people through sponsored posts and ads in the news feed and direct them to a conversation in Messenger.
Periscope Introduces New Ways to Connect With Audiences: Periscope rolled out “three new ways to connect with your audiences and the communities on Periscope – with Superfans, groups, and logging into Periscope.tv.” The new Superfans feature allows broadcasters to identify and target the top 10 “most engaged” members of their audience. Building on this information, broadcasters can now create groups where they can “broadcast to and share videos with more granular sets of people” such as friends, superfans, or a community built around specific interests. The Superfans and Groups features are available on the Periscope app for Android and iOS and on the web.
Periscope recently updated Periscope.tv with an “easier way to search, browse suggested and highlighted channels” and has just rolled out “a more complete web experience” that allows users to send hearts in any live video on Periscope.tv.
Snapchat Adds New World Lenses, Rewind Capabilities, and Support for Spectacles: With its recent updates for iOS and Android, Snapchat introduced World Lenses. Similar to Snapchat’s Selfie Lenses, the new World Lenses change your background and surroundings. According to TechCrunch, “some World Lenses will actually animate your face too and can have different effects depending on if you use your front- or rear-facing camera.” Snapchat also added the ability to rewind individual snaps and entire stories with just one swipe.
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more on social media in this IMS blog:
Flipped/Blended/… Teaching/Learning: FridayLive! Collaborative Development Series
Presenters: Steve Gilbert, TLT Group Beth Dailey, TLT Group Dale Parker, Senior Faculty, Cambridge College Penny Kuckkahn, Nicolet College, Instructional Designer Robert Voelker-Morris, Faculty Technology Consultant, University of Oregon Winona Hatcher, Instructional Designer, Augusta University
Date: 11/11/201616
Time: 1:30 PM ET pre session. 2:00 -3:00 PM ET Main event. 3:00 – 3:30 PM ET After thoughts
Description
This is the third in our Flipped/Blended… Teaching/Learning Collaborative Development Series. Faculty considering the next steps toward flipping/blended..teaching/learning and instructional designers and design consultants will all find something of benefit from this series.
In the spring we explored what it means to flip a classroom and added to the flipped classroom toolkit. Over the summer a team of instructional designers assisted a faculty member in designing a flipped lesson. This collaborative development process is the basis of the series.
Introduction to functional programming principles, including immutability, higher-order functions, and recursion using the Clojure programming language. This workshop will cover getting started with the Clojure REPL, building programs through function composition, testing, and web-development using ClojureScript.
This workshop will do a deep dive into approaches and recommend best practices for customizing Blacklight applications. We will discuss a range of topics, including styling and theming, customizing discovery experiences, and working with Solr.
Proposed by: Chris Beer, Jessie Keck, and Jack Reed
We all encounter failure in our professional lives: failed projects, failed systems, failed organizations. We often think of failure as a negative, but it has intrinsic value — and since it’s inevitable that we’ll eventually experience failure ourselves, it’s important to know how to accept it, how to take lessons from it, and how to grow from it professionally. Fail4Lib, now in its 5th year, is the perennial Code4Lib preconference dedicated to discussing and coming to terms with the failures that we all face in our professional lives. It is a safe space for us to explore failure, to talk about our own experiences with failure, and to encourage enlightened risk taking. The goal of Fail4Lib is for participants to be adept at failing gracefully, so that when we do fail, we do so in a way that moves us forward. This half-day preconference will consist of case studies, round-table discussions, and, for those interested in sharing, lightning talks on failures we’ve dealt with in our own work.
Amazon Web Services currently offers 58 services ranging from the familiar compute and storage systems to game development and the internet of things. We will focus on the 20-some services that you should be aware of as you move your applications to their cloud.
The morning session will be mostly overview and the afternoon session will be more practical examples and discussion. This could be broken into two sessions.
Proposed by: Cary Gordon, t/b/d, and t/b/d
FOLIO is a library services platform — infrastructure that allows cooperating library apps to share data. This workshop is a hands-on introduction to FOLIO for developers of library apps. In this tutorial you will work with your own Vagrant image through a series of exercises designed to demonstrate how to install an app on the platform and use the data sources and design elements the platform provides.
Have an idea for an app? Want to work with FOLIO developers and others in the community on the FOLIO platform to make it happen. Come to this half-day hack-a-thon! Ideas for new developers will be posted in the project Jira, or bring your own concepts and work with others to make them reality.
REQUIREMENTS Laptop (4GB) with Vagrant installed. Attending the FOLIO Tutorial is recommended, but not required.
Google Apps script is a server-side implementation of JavaScript which supports API calls to Google Services. This can provide an excellent platform for developing simple library applications. The libraries at Georgetown University and the University of Dayton have successfully deployed applications built with Google App Script.
In this workshop, we will step through the various types of applications that can be built with Google Apps Script.
(1) Custom cell formulas
(2) Spreadsheet Add On Functions (menu items, time based triggers)
(3) Google Apps Script as a Web Service
(4) Google Apps Script Add-Ons that can be shared globally or by domain
In this workshop, we will build sample instances of each of these types of applications (wifi-permitting) and spend some time brainstorming additional applications that would be useful for the library community.
Calls to mindfulness and self care can have mixed reception in our field. While some view this important work as navel-gazing or unnecessary, it is integral to being present and avoiding burnout. Often this skewed attention to output comes at the expense of our personal lives, our organizations, our health, our relationships, and our mental well-being. Learning to prioritize self-care is an ongoing project among those who perform emotional labor. While some view the work of mindfulness as self-indulgent, it has proven to keep many on the track of being present and avoiding burnout.*
The purpose of this preconference is to provide a short introduction to self care and mindfulness with practical work we can use regardless of setting. We’ll discuss microaggressions and allyship (microaggressions being the brief and commonplace verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities that marginalized people of various groups experience daily and allyship referring to the powerful role that individuals from privileged groups can play in supporting marginalized individuals). We will then transition to a modified unconference setting where participants can practice scenarios and learn practical solutions. Each of the presenters has different set of skills and experiences that allow for many techniques and strategies to be explored. Preconference attendees will participate in sessions like “Mentor Speed Dating” where they get to talk to and question potential mentors/mentees. They may be coached through a guided meditation or walked through a calming breathing exercise. For those looking to a more physical space, office yoga and stretching techniques may be shared depending on the outcomes of the unconference interest.
Foundational materials and articles will be shared with the registrants prior to the meeting with the option of further discussion at the workshop. An open access guide to all the resources and readings will be available after the preconference, and people will be encouraged to share additional their tools on a website.
Suggested Hashtag #c4lselfcare
* Abenavoli, R.M., Jennings, P.A., Greenberg, M.T., Harris, A.R., & Katz, D.A. (2013). The protective effects of mindfulness against burnout among educators. Psychology of Education Review, 37(2), 57-69
Proposed by: Carmen Mitchell, Lia Friedman, and Torie Quinonez
In this preconference, participants will be introduced to Virtual Reality uses in library settings, notably, by way of the VR Reading Room. Within the VR Reading Room prototype, users can collaboratively explore digital collections (e.g. HathiTrust) by way of VR headsets. Participants of this workshop will have the opportunity to experience HTC Vive functionality. The system will be setup with a prototype e-book experiment in order to model several VR affordances. Once attendees have been introduced to the HTC Vive hardware and sample project, groups of participants will have an opportunity to further brainstorm novel uses cases.
Python[1] has become one of the dominant languages in scientific computing and is used by researchers around the world. Its popularity is due in large part to a rich set of libraries for data analysis like Pandas[2] and NumPy[3] and tools for exploring scientific code like Jupyter notebooks[4]. Join us for this half-day workshop on the basics of using Pandas within a Jupyter notebook. We will cover importing data, selecting and subsetting data, grouping data, and generating simple visualizations. All are welcome, but some familiarity with Python is recommended, e.g. the concepts covered in the Codecademy[5] or Google[6] Python courses.
Learn about the features and capabilities of Sufia, a Hydra-based repository solution. Attendees will participate in a hand-on demonstration where they deposit content, edit metadata, create collections, and explore access control options. Attendees should bring laptops with Chrome, Firefox, or Safari installed. Please plan on bringing at least one image, document, or other digital content that you’re comfortable uploading and using for demo and experimentation purposes 🙂
The web can be a trove of openly accessible data, but it is not always readily available in a format that allows it to be downloaded for analysis and reuse. This workshop aims to introduce attendees to web scraping, a technique to automate extracting data from websites.
Part one of the workshop will use browser extensions and web tools to get started with web scraping quickly, give examples where this technique can be useful, and introduce how to use XPath queries to select elements on a page.
Part two will introduce how to write a spider in Python to follow hyperlinks and scrape several web pages using the Scrapy framework. We will conclude with an overview of the legal aspects of web scraping and an open discussion.
You don’t need to be a coder to enjoy this workshop! Anyone wishing to learn web scraping is welcome, although some familiarity with HTML will be helpful. Part two will require some experience with Python, attendees unfamiliar with this language are welcome to stay only for part one and still learn useful web scraping skills!
Paper prototyping is a low-cost, structured brainstorming technique that uses materials such as paper and pencils to better understand the way users interact with physical, visual, and textual information. It can help us learn how to better think through workflows, space design, and information architecture. Session attendees will learn about the ways low-fidelity prototyping and wireframing can be used to develop ideas, troubleshoot workflows, and improve learning and interaction.
In the first half of the workshop, participants will step through activities in icon design, persona development, and task development. In the second half they will develop a low fidelity prototype and step through a guerilla usability testing process with it.
Proposed by: Ekatarina (Eka) Grguric and Andreas Orphanides
