Preparing for TLA

The past few weeks I have been preparing materials to take to conference. I am doing two presentations there, one that I don't feel very confident about and one that I think will blow the socks off of lots of people. Oddly, I have put the most work into the one that I am not very confident about.

What am I presenting on? First, I have a poster presentation that I am giving to show off my screencasts of the Tennessee Electronic Library (TEL). My partner, Alisa Breece, and I have been creating screencasts to help students navigate some of the databases supplied by TEL. These tutorials are aimed at students who may be working at home or just generally outside the supervision of the librarian. Students notoriously wait until the last moment to complete assignments and often find themselves at home trying to navigate resources that they do not understand. These screencasts are meant to guide them through the research process in these various databases. We have currently hosted them on another blog that I author - http://tutorialsbychristaandalisa.blogspot.com - so check them out if you get a chance.

My bigger presentation - and I say bigger only because it is a more dificult subject for me - is on design practices that can help libraries market themselves more effectively. Too often we focus on the methods of "marketing" - flyers, web advertisements, word of mouth - but we don't focus on the aesthetics of what we produce. The fact is, librarians often just don't have the time to study current trends in design or even to learn how to apply these designs to their productions. So this is what I and my partner, David Green, have attempted to do. We have simply gone through and identified what are the current graphic and web design trends. Yes, most of the librarians present at this conference will probably not be the web designers for their library website, but we hope that they will be able to take away things to suggest to their web designers, whoever those parties might be.

What am I learning from this process? Lots! To begin with, I knew absolutely nothing about graphic design when I began this process. But much research later, I sort of realized that I didn't have to be an experts. There were already lots of experts out there who already had an opinion. I simply needed to analyze and interpret the data that they had already made available. Sounds simple, right? WRONG! It was a very time consuming process to go around looking at millions of websites and determine, based upon what the experts were saying and what I was seeing with my own two eyes, what were the most popular design practices.

Questions that have popped up that I don't have time to research? Libraries don't seem to be doing a great job allowing users to share their content. This was one of the greatest webdesign trends from the corporate world that was just not present in the library world. At all. A handfull of libraries did link to their facebook or twitter pages - they do have them - but they didn't make a way to share actual content. You know that little share button that you see on millions of webpages? It is just not there on library websites. Why? I don't know. That would be the question of the century. I asked a couple of practicing librarians and one technology guru and the answer was simply I don' know - and that sometimes things take a long time to catch on in libraryland. Anyway, it is a question that I would be curious to find the answer to, if I had the time to actually research it and do something about it. Libraries, where are your social networking options?

Well, I have now rambled on about things most of my readers probably don't care anything about. But look for my response to the TLA conference soon because it is next week!