Session Description:
Partnerships with departments and outreach to students are key to an academic library’s success. Providing access to immersive Virtual Reality experiences may offer another avenue for libraries to support learning at their institution. We want to share our experience with launching a mobile VR station in our institution’s Curriculum Materials Centre (located in the library). We hope to provide a cost-effective model for supporting this emerging technology in a neutral, accessible space.

Session Description:
Academic librarians have developed a curriculum that leverages students’ interest in makerspace equipment such as 3D printers, CNC machines, and sewing machines to teach them information literacy skills. The typical student who uses a makerspace doesn’t receive the traditional information literacy instruction in their coursework. By correlating the Framework for Information Literacy with makerspace equipment training, librarians created a rewarding process where peer instructors teach essential information literacy skills to any student. This presentation will highlight how anyone can infuse information literacy concepts into makerspace equipment instruction and will provide attendees with the tools needed to get started.

Session Description:
Find out how three librarians and one engineer used eye-tracking equipment and software to determine how students utilized the library website, and the ways in which the website succeeded in being an effective resource for students, and where it failed. The session will focus on the experience of creating and performing the study, including the many successes and failures along the way. Anyone interested in conducting their own usability study will come away with tips, ideas, and pitfalls to avoid, as they embark on their own study!?

Session Description:
Learn how students perceive library content through assistive technology and how that can go a long way to understanding how and why accessibility best practices work. This session will demonstrate several easy-to-use tools and how they can provide insight for preparing universally accessible content for your library’s online services. You will also gain access to a sharable toolkit you can bring home to your library content creators.  

Session Description:
The Raspberry Pi is small $35 wifi-compatible computer that can run linux. Even more importantly, it offers easy connections to electronic components like sensors, lights, and speakers. This combination of low entry cost and high capability make the Raspberry Pi a great platform for experimentation and innovation. As the pace of change in research libraries changes, it becomes increasingly important to respond to new challenges quickly and flexibly with low cost. Learn how a research library can leverage this tool as an platform for innovation in this session detailing four library problems and their respective solutions powered by Raspberry Pi.

Session Description:
True: libraries use content management systems (CMSs) to support research, teaching, and learning. The content we create and publish through these platforms is critical to our users finding what they need, discovering what we offer, and accomplishing their goals. Also true: It’s hard to get this right! Learn from our mistakes. We’ve synthesized years of lessons learned the hard way into a flexible, adaptable framework through which you can more efficiently and effectively leverage the power of your CMS to present engaging, on-point content that’s appropriate for your many, varied audiences – however big or small your team.

Session Description:
Through conversations in the community, partnerships can form and bring together diverse people to enhance the discovery of materials in our own backyards. When we learned of a community-based initiative by our local history consortium, we saw it as an opportunity to join in and provide leadership in preserving, sustaining, and bringing greater awareness to the history collections in our region. During this session you will learn how we used tools we have, such as Digital Commons, LibGuides and Tableau, to benefit the many valuable organizations and resources in our community that often go undiscovered.

Session Description:
PLACE, the Position-based Library Archive Coordinate Explorer, is an open source geospatial search interface enabling easier discovery of digital map collections that can be difficult to locate through standard text-based searching. Through PLACE, via a click or search, users can zoom to a region and then locate and download digital collections resources with geographic extents that intersect the search area. The prototype PLACE installation contains three thousand items from five collections including topographic maps, historical air photos, geologic field trip guidebooks, and historic atlases. Identifying geographic coordinates for “geospatial ready” digitized cultural heritage materials was key to the project.

Session Description:
Join an educational technology entrepreneur and an associate dean of library services in conversation about the transformative next phase of Open Educational Resources (OER). We will explore how OER can enable cross-institutional collaboration by subject area or discipline, align learning objectives and content, and enable creative and open pedagogy to more fully engage students in their learning process. The collaborative capabilities of OER, when fully utilized, serve to bring diverse voices and ways of knowing into educational materials.

Session Description:
It’s an understatement to say that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will change the world. In fact, it will revolutionize the world, and in every way of life, including education. Thus, in order to be on the cutting edge, libraries and higher education need to begin to understand ways AI can be used and harness its power. This session will demonstrate an innovative application of AI to the new form of academic currency–the micro-credential–and discuss how this application could lead to broader uses in libraries and academia.