IFLA Posters

Let me tell you, two consecutive days of two-hour poster sessions is a lot.

IFLA 2016 has two separate days of "manned" poster sessions. I spoke to a lot of interesting people during the poster sessions and gave out quite a few business cards. My co-presenter was not able to make it, so I was on my own for the four hours of poster session—she is responsible for the main design of the poster, which was well-received. I used all three of my foreign languages. Among the most interesting people were the UX professor from Chile who has become the director of UX for the whole campus in Chile and reports directly to their provost. I also spoke with a retired librarian from Berlin (in German!) who worked at the Ibero-Amerikanishes Institut (Institute for Latin American Studies) for the last 14 years of her career. I also saw colleagues from another North Carolina institution, UNC-G. I took 15 minutes of one of the sessions to see a few of the posters. Many of them were well done. Others had the same homemade flair we see at non-international conferences. I also saw one that was done by a former SLIS grad from UW-Madison. Her poster was about using a robot to allow people to experience the library from afar. Another poster of interest was about using card-swiping at the entrance of a BI classroom. I am including photos of my poster, a link to the poster in the ECU repository, as well as the other two posters I mentioned. Enjoy!

Connect with your Users: Usability Testing and How User Experience May Actually Work for You

From Acceptance to Assessment: Academic Librarians CAN Card-Swipe

Reach Out at Your Library with Telepresence Robot Technology

2016 IFLA Conference Recap

I had the pleasure of attending the 82nd World Library and Information Congress (IFLA 2016) in Columbus, OH. Instead of a blow-by-blow of the events, I will share the top highlights of this conference.

1.    IFLA knows how to throw a party.

Fashion models on the runway during the Lifesavers portion

Imagine walking into a conference opening session—you likely would expect a bunch of boring introductions and speeches. Now imagine being blown away by the fact that there is a fashion runway, disco lights, and a concert-style speaker rig blaring Ricky Martin. Did I mention this was at 10:30 AM on a Sunday?

The opening session was two and a half hours of uninterrupted ooh’s and ahh’s. There were trapeze artists. People in animal costumes. Live animals. A marching band. Fashion models. A drag queen singing Adele. A men’s choir. Skits. They even gave out Lifesavers candy to the entire crowd. The only thing that was missing was pyrotechnics. My colleague had been to the conference before, but she did not prepare me for the fact that they would introduce you to the city and host country through a big show. I was actually glad she had not because it made it that more surprising and amazing. It was like the Olympics opening ceremony, but better. The emcee was the announcer for the Cavaliers (NBA). Here is a video of the people doing the trapeze act, if you are interested. 
 

Nina West

 

2.    There is a UNESCO Information Literacy Framework that I hope to investigate further. They are also planning a Global Media and Information Literacy week from October 31-November 5.

I feel that this primer may help in the creation of the OER that a colleague and I are working on. A link can be found here: http://www.uis.unesco.org/Communication/Documents/157020E.pdf

Information Literacy in different locales was discussed, including Europe and Latin America. This session was memorable because I got into a group of people during the discussion session who were speaking Spanish. I could understand most of it and they were very accommodating to let me take part with my (not so academically perfect) Spanish.

I am interested in doing something for Global Media and Information Literacy week, and due to its proximity to Open Access week, I plan to follow up with our Scholarly Communications librarians.

3.    Wikipedia is doing some very interesting things with cultural organizations.

This session was neat because there were real-live paid employees of Wikipedia there, as well as librarians who had organized edit-a-thons and other projects. They made a call to librarians to help make Wikipedia a much more accurate resource. They are partnering with lots of libraries, digital collections, and museums to help get coverage for their special collections. There are over 80,000 editors active per month and 15 billion page views. Apparently there are a lot of 30-something white males who edit Wikipedia and they are trying to change that demographic (despite the fact that both of the Wikipedia employees were young, white males.)  They also mentioned some funny-but-true Wikipedia articles, such as “Chicken Eyeglasses.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_eyeglasses Another great example of a Wikipedia project was a library in Singapore that trained teenagers how to do interviews and then had the students conduct interviews with successful business people in Singapore. They also had to write up the Wikipedia entry for that business or edit the existing one.

4.    Makerspaces need to be accessible and intentionally designed for use.

The best session I saw was from a UW-Madison PhD student who did a very thorough study of makerspaces and their use. Here is the paper the presentation was based on. http://library.ifla.org/1384/1/079-crawford-barniskis-en.pdf 

5.    Columbus is a really vibrant city with lots of things to do. I know a lot of people there!

I was able to stay with a friend from Iowa while I was in Columbus. I also got to go out to eat with my parents’ dear friends and two of their daughters. I got to see a few SLIS grads one evening. Columbus has a free circulator bus that takes you all over the city.  I was able to get to the Ohio State University Library on my last day there. It was beautiful. I’m including pictures of the entryway, Grand Reading Room, and one of their library instruction classroom here. The official tours were on Friday and I left on Tuesday night. I also missed the cultural evening at the museum—not something I would do if I had to do it over again.

Entryway with lots of open space and glass

One of their library instruction classrooms

Grand Reading Room--with a great reproduction of the Nike of Samothrace

I am so glad that I got to go to IFLA, even though I did not get to spend the entire week (!!!) of the conference. I really did appreciate the international atmosphere of the conference. I am not sure if I would travel again to an IFLA, so it was great that I was able to take part in it while it was in the US. For librarians at agricultural, special, and national libraries, I can surely see why this is a conference they would want to go to every year.