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NYLA Poster Sessions
Friday, October 16
11:00 AM – 12:30 PM
Make plans to visit the NYLA Poster Session to view displays offered by your peers on specific programs, policies, and services. These displays offer an opportunity to gather vast amounts of information on diverse topics in a short period of time. The presenters will be on hand to discuss their projects and answer your questions. Posters will cover many subjects appealing to public, school, academic and special libraries.
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2009 Accepted Poster Sessions
Click here for Accepted Diversity Fair presentations
Below are details on the Poster Sessions that will be presented at the 2009 NYLA Annual Conference on Friday, October 16, 2009. The Poster Sessions will take place in the Conference Center Niagara Falls Exhibit Hall and will be available for review from 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM.
Stephanie Barrett
New York State Library
Linking the New NOVELNY Databases to the Standards
ProQuest Platinum and Grolier Online are two new NOVELNY databases, available to all New Yorkers with their local library card or driver license. Both vendors have made an effort to align their database content to state and federal educational standards. Teachers can find lesson plans on the vendor web sites. Vendor guides for classroom use will also be featured, as well as information on training sessions.
Susan DeMasi
Suffolk County Community College- Ammerman Campus
Radical Relief: The Federal Writers’ Project and the Ten Thousand Stories They Told
This poster session focuses on the Federal Writers’ Project of the 1930’s and the numerous resources --ranging from online digitized collections to archived manuscript collections -- available to students, faculty, librarians, scholars, and others. The session also showcases how these historical materials can be incorporated into learning activities.
During the Great Depression, the Federal Writers’ Project (a part of the Works Progress Administration) hired thousands of unemployed writers, researchers, and related workers such as librarians to create a written “self-portrait of America.” From 1935-1943, over 1000 titles were published. This included the now-lauded American Guide series, children’s books, encyclopedias, and regional publications.
The Project also embarked on an unprecedented undertaking: to collect first-person life histories from “ordinary” men and women. As many as ten thousand narratives, gathered from ex-slaves, immigrants, and people of various ethnic groups, regions, and occupations, were collected and transcribed.
Now, seventy years later, libraries and archives are homes to the massive amounts of materials (including unpublished manuscripts) and research produced by the FWP. These treasures are still being mined today by scholars and researchers, resulting in a continuing stream of books, videos, articles, and more. (Two recent examples include the book and film promoted through the ALA’s outreach program, Soul of A People.)
Jill Dixon & Caryl Ward
Binghamton University
From Awareness to Education: Building an Effective PR Program
In late 2003, Binghamton University Libraries launched a PR effort to enhance awareness of the Libraries, which were underutilized and underappreciated. We had much to offer but our patrons, especially undergraduates, had little knowledge or understanding about all the services and resources that were available to them.
The newly created PR Committee began its awareness campaign by developing a new branding slogan — Connect, Discover, Create —to represent the Libraries’ core values and “reason for being.” Along with a new logo and graphic style, the Libraries’ new brand was featured in a variety of promotional activities, including Library Amnesty Day, publication of a print/online newsletter, and factoids in the student newspaper. The campaign’s overall success can be measured in higher gate counts and reference inquiries — bucking the national trend.
Today the Libraries are more popular than ever! With the heightened awareness, the PR Committee is now focusing on providing more in-depth information about what the library can do for students, faculty and researchers at a highly competitive institution. After all, there is an ongoing need for PR in an academic library as the biggest patron base, undergraduates, turns over every four years.
This poster session will examine the formation of the Binghamton University Libraries PR Committee and its work from developing a broad PR awareness campaign to a more in-depth educational campaign to promote the Libraries’ reference, research and instructional services.
Robert Dowd
New York State Library
Apples to Zebra Mussels : New York State Government Publications
The New York State Document Depository Program improves access to government information with monthly bulk shipments of paper documents to libraries across New York. Historically, publications were also filmed or fiched for preservation and distribution purposes. Paper documents acquired by the State Library since 1995 have been digitally scanned into a "modern microformat" with wide appeal. Today’s publication landscape is presently a mix of paper and electronic. New York State agencies post reports to the internet in a variety of locations (not all under a 'publications' heading) and for various periods of time (some agencies replace the last edition with the new one). Legislation requires agencies "to forward a copy of each public document recorded in an electronic, online or machine readable format" to the New York State Library. Compliance is uneven, but web surfing uncovers digital documents on a regular basis. We download them to a local server. Our publicly-accessible digital collection, therefore, contains PDF items that have been scanned from paper and documents that were published in electronic format by state agencies. The poster illustrates two parallel acquisitions processes that contribute to a uniform and seamless digital government documents collection at the New York State Library.
Marzena Ermler
New York Public Library
Best Practices for Leadership and Management Training
As people’s lives continue to become more complex, the services that Libraries provide and the expectations for these services gain complexity as well. This in return requires that the Library’s internal processes and external functions are led by a workforce of strong, competent and flexible leaders.
To prepare such a cadre of leaders, the New York Public Library has been investing a great number of resources into the Management and Leadership training. I would like to present our training methodology, share the insights we have gained during the curriculum development process, and highlight organizational benefits of the Leadership and Management training. I will illustrate my points with examples of NYPL’s four most recent Leadership and Management programs.
Nancy Foasberg
Queens College
Circulating Pixels: Will E-book Readers Constrict or Expand Users’ Access to Information?
The Amazon Kindle and other e-book readers are big news, due to their portability and ease of use, but will they be of any use to libraries? In the past, virtually held materials have been made available on devices owned by the users; that is, primarily computers with internet access. However, the proprietary nature of recent e-book readers, Kindle in particular, seems likely to prevent this type of access. If e-book readers gain popularity as a method of reading, libraries that can only provide more traditional methods of access could be left behind.
Given the potential importance of this useful technology, the Queens College Libraries have received a Tech Fee grant to study students’ uses of Kindle. We are certainly not the only institution exploring e-book readers, and a look around can help provide understanding of this trend. This project will explore the legal and financial feasibility of circulating e-books on portable, user-owned devices and the ways that other libraries are dealing with these issues.
Stephanie Hartwell-Mandella
St. Johns University Division of Library and Information Sciences Graduate Program
Storytime Anytime!
The communities that libraries serve are rapidly changing. Increasingly, family dynamics vary greatly within a community – from two working-parents to a single working parent to extended families living in the home. As the economic situation deteriorates, the library’s vital relationship with the community can be beneficial for these families.
Librarians are knowledgeable and understand the correlation between children’s growth in literacy and participation in storytime and other literacy programs.
By offering storytime and other literacy programs during non-work hours or on the weekends, they provide an opportunity for families to spend quality time together on schedules that “work” for them. These programs bring families and communities together in a comfortable and safe environment where all may learn from one another and learn about the many services the library provides. This poster session highlights after hours storytime and other different and exciting ways in which public libraries are addressing the needs of communities by looking at current literature and a special project done through St. John’s University Library and Information Science Division. The evaluation process includes participant feedback and observations conducted by St. John’s graduate students who are recipients of grant funding.
Matthew Hogan, Mgr of Digital Services and Resources Sharing; Kathleen Jackson, Coordinator for Council Programs; Diane Capalongo, Administrative Assistant
South Central Regional Council (SCRLC)
Tools of History: Growing and Sustaining a Digital Repository Program
The mission of Tools of History is to provide end-users with universal access to the unique collections that reflect our regional cultural heritage. In its service area, SCRLC reaches over 500 libraries located in the counties of Allegany, Broome, Cayuga, Chemung, Chenango, Cortland, Delaware, Otsego, Schuyler, Seneca, Steuben, Tioga, Tompkins, and Yates. Tools of History (ToH), SCRLC’s digital repository, provides libraries and cultural heritage organizations a cost effective way to encourage awareness and access to these unique regional holdings. This collaborative digitizing program was unveiled to the public in May 2009 (www.toolsofhistory.org). Currently, the main objectives of SCRLC’s Digitizing Program are sustainability of ToH and the identification of organizational partners in the South Central region. Integral to these objectives is effective promotion to end users and institutions. SCRLC continues to offer training for those engaging in the creation of digital collections.
Key objectives at this phase of the program:
• Develop a Boot Camp training model, to be available both online and in a workshop setting.
• Identify collections of note in the region and then support the process of digitization including cataloging and scanning.
• Promote Tools of History as a valuable resource for researchers, educators and the public worldwide
Barbara Kane
Southwestern High School
Digital Rights & Responsibilities for Students in the 21st Century
I have worked with Social Studies teachers to create and present a short unit on digital ethics for grade 12 and would like the opportunity to share the idea, the materials and examples of our students’ projects.
I considered the fact that these are seniors who will soon leave high school and enter the work force or college, or both. Most have cell phones and mp3 players, many have Facebook or MySpace accounts and some have their own laptops.
Beginning with the premise that computerization has impacted almost every facet of 21st century life; I introduced the conflict between legality, convenience, and ethics. Students participated in very active discussions on the comparative morality of plagiarism, downloading music and videos, and similar common teen activities! For their projects, students chose from a list of issues such as the educational use of cell phones, pros and cons of RFIDs, wikis, including Wikipedia, internet gambling, digital privacy, mp3 format entertainment, plagiarism, etc. and each team created a PowerPoint on their topic that was intended to be shown in the library.
We have converted all 32 PowerPoint presentations into screensaver shows that run on some of our library workstations. These have been watched by passersby and will be highlighted as we begin the unit later this semester with another group of seniors, and with the freshman Intro to Computers classes.
Debra Lucas
D’Youville College
Interlibrary loan assessment: The chronicles of assessing services in a small private college library’s interlibrary loan department
Interlibrary loan surveys can determine user satisfaction levels regarding accuracy, thoroughness, convenience, and turn-around time. Service assessment is a required component of strategic planning and decision making in any library service center. Data can support theories that excellent customer service is being provided. Even though the librarians staffing the Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service at D’Youville College believed that our students were highly satisfied with and most impressed by our recent service improvement initiatives, we did not have any concrete data that would help drive future strategic decisions. We wanted to create a survey tool that would help us gather information that would help us drive change. However being short on staff time and resources, we felt restricted. We examined and then we explored ways in which a small library can create an assessment tool and analyze the survey results. This poster session will examine all aspects of our experience with assessing Interlibrary Loan services.
Sara Rofofsky Marcus
Queensborough Community College
Multiple Learning Styles, Single Library: How to Match Technologies and Learning Styles to Patron Needs
This session will explore Gardner's Multiple Intelligences, and how the use of both Web 1.0 and 2.0 tools can help to meet these varied learning styles in a single library. Reaching out to students and others, whether in a face-to-face setting or a totally online setting, or anywhere in-between, this session will have attendees leaving with ideas for integrating new methods of presenting materials and assessing understanding of these materials in ways that reach out to patrons who learn in different methods. Student engagement, new pedagogies and new ways of approaching old pedagogies and assessments will all be explored as ways that can benefit from the use of varying Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 technologies. Additionally, Web 1.0 and 2.0 technologies will be explored briefly as technologies and more in-depth as ways to assist one in reaching patrons through formats best suited to the individual’s learning technological preferences. Addressing the interests of the techno-savvy and also the concerns of the newcomer, this session will address ways to jump in with both feet and ways to start out testing the waters before going full-blast.
Karen Rutkowski
Fayetteville Free Library
“Smart Play” @ the FFL
Public libraries are in a unique position to provide educational services to families with young children. This is especially true in today’s difficult economic climate, when Americans are looking for low cost or free ways to enhance their child’s learning experiences. One of the ways libraries can fill this need is by providing early literacy opportunities for infants, toddlers and preschoolers. Children entering kindergarten will need at least 1000 hours of “early literacy experiences” to develop the foundational skills necessary to begin reading instruction and to stay on grade level in elementary school. Attending a library program such as “Smart Play” @ the FFL is one way that parents can supplement their child’s early learning so that they can best profit from formal reading instruction.
“Smart Play” @ the FFL is an early literacy program designed for children ages 2 to 5 years that is based on the six early literacy skills outlined in the program Every Child Ready to Read @ your Library. The program features six themed play stations that children and parents can explore at their own pace. Within each station, educational toys and materials have been chosen that will expose children to letters, sounds and new vocabulary, as well as stimulate imaginative play. Parents are provided with guidelines and suggestions on how the materials can enhance learning. A primary goal of “Smart Play” at the FFL is to educate parents about the six skills and how they can use them to prepare their children for formal reading instruction.
My presentation will focus on how we have implemented “Smart Play” @ the FFL. Participants have remarked that they love “Smart Play” @ the FFL because it is similar to a regional museum program for young children but it is free of charge and in their own backyard.
Meg Van Patten
Baldwinsville Public Library
MOVING OR REARRANGING A LIBRARY
There are a number of the renovations, new construction and space reallocations currently happening within many NYS libraries. I have had people from other libraries ask me about how we handled our move. Thus I decided to suggest this poster session. Whether you are moving the entire library to a different building or moving collections within an existing facility the key to a successful move is planning. The proposed poster session would deal with measuring collections and collection space, creating a bid document for potential moving companies, educating the public about the move, scheduling workers, assigning tasks, providing support to the workers. The display will include examples of charts and formulas used to plot out the move. I will provide handouts that will include the forms, an outline of the process and tips that could be adapted by a library planning a move or collection rearrangement.
Tinamarie Vella
CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, Research Center
Using Web 2.0 Tools to Enhance Research Services
The advent of the Internet has changed the landscape of research. The notion that anyone could find anything on any subject at any time has become commonplace, and understandably poses various issues and controversies about the reliability of research in academic libraries today.
Working at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate School of Journalism, our user population is in constant need of viable, useful and reputable information. Yet, the users are less inclined to ask for research assistance. Using wikis, blogs, social networking/bookmarking, such as Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, and other tools gives these users the power to utilize resources at their own pace and on their own time. This structure establishes approaches to provide support outside the physical library space, and reach students in the virtual environment. These tools allow for an adaptable environment of resources and encourage an exchange of information. Implementing this kind of structure will only emphasize the vital role of librarians as information gatekeepers. Librarians become essential and Web 2.0 tools help to meet such needs and also strengthen the quality of research in respective academic communities.
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