ACRL 2009 in Seattle, Washington

It has been about a month since ACRL 2009 in Seattle but spring break was right after the conference and it takes a little time for all that I learn and see to sink in. I thought the conference overall was very well organized and engaging. I was very pleased about the green theme and happy to see the green practices being followed through with during the conference.

The location of the conference was excellent since it was in the beautiful waterfront city of Seattle. I did see the famous Seattle Public Library and was quite amazed and the modern architecture and design of the building. There were many patrons busy using the resources when I went in to tour it. Below is a photo I took of the "Living Room" area on the the 3rd floor of the Seattle Public Library.



I attended a little bit of all the different types of presentations. I saw a couple of Cyber Zed Shed presentations which were 20 minute presentations about how libraries are using different new technologies. Nedra Peterson, the Director of Woodbury Library in Burbank California, had great ideas to make instruction classes more engaging and memorable by using video or audio clips from popular movies or songs that reference research related topics. Her presentation was called Popculture Multi-Media and Library Instruction.

She pointed out that the emotions invoked by the media clips can help students identify with the content you are presenting which will help them remember it better. She mentioned using clips from the movie School of Rock, the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and a music clip from a Green Day song. Now hopefully I can keep my eyes and ears open and be as creative as Nedra is about finding research related clips to use for my library instruction classes. Thanks for the great ideas!

Another Cyber Zed Shed presentation I saw was iMacros presented by Todd Quinn at Northern State University. iMacros extension is a very efficient Firefox extension that you can use to create a series of search steps into one click. Or in other words, it is a little program to perform repetitive, multi-step tasks on your browser. Quinn said you could use it as a poor librarians federated search. iMacros that you make can also be bookmarked on your computer or on sites like delicious and shared with others. This handout has a link to the Firefox iMacros extension and other important info to get you started using iMacros. Also, Quinn's LibGuide page at Northern State has a list of other useful tools he has presented about at other conferences. Thanks Todd!

See you all in my next post when I talk about some of the contributed and invited papers as well as panel discussions I attended at the ACRL 2009 conference.