Archive for the ‘Presentations’ Category

The folks at Blue Blots have put together a great list of 20 Online Tools To Help You Create Slideshow Presentations. These are all useful tools to add special effects, backgrounds, and music to your photos and organize them into online slideshows. I can see many of these coming in handy for creating entertaining presentations.

Richard Byrne writes for School Library Journal about The Best Online Presentation Tools: Top picks for hosting a live tutorial or collaborative session. If you’re working on a collaborative project, or are looking for tools to provide live support to patrons, students, or clients, you’ll want to have a look at this list. Here are just a few:

• Join.me
• Big Marker
• Vyew

Today I will be giving a workshop at METRO: The Metropolitan New York Library Council on card sorting which is a type of usability test to discover how your users think about your website content so that your can organize it in a way that’s findable. I have made the content of the workshop available in a wiki if anyone is interested in learning about how to conduct card sorts. Here’s a description of the workshop:

“Web users spend an average of 8–10 seconds and three clicks on your Web site looking for what they need before they get frustrated and click away. Whether you are developing a new Web site or redesigning an existing one, it is imperative to determine an intuitive and usable navigational structure and taxonomy for your user community. Card sorting is a technique used in the information architecture field to determine a classification scheme that speaks to your user population. Discover how to use this quick and inexpensive technique to understand how your users think about your Web site and its content. Learn how to run both an open and a closed card sort, analyze the results, and make recommendations based on your data. This workshop explores both online and offline card-sorting techniques as well as analysis software. Make sure your information is findable and increase usability by involving your users in the process of designing your Web site — they will thank you for it!”

Melanie Pinola at Lifehacker offers advice about How to Create Presentations that Don’t Suck. As information professionals we are constantly on the lookout for new and engaging ways to deliver content to our users, one of which is through giving presentations. If you’re struggling with how to make your presentations more interesting and inspirational, you’ll want to check out this post. These are the key problem areas the author identifies:

• Problem 1: Too many ideas on one slide
• Problem 2: Cliches and Clipart
• Problem 3: Lack of emphasis
• Problem 4: Random design choices
• Problem 5: No relationship to the audience

A while back I gave a presentation on just this topic, you can check it out below for more tips!

Klint Finley at ReadWrite Enterprise rounds up 9 Presentation Apps for the iPad. If you want to take your presentations with you on the go but don’t want to lug around a full laptop, you’ll want to download one of these handy apps to your iPad.

The organizers of this year’s ACRL 2011 conference have posted all of the contributed papers online for download. There are over 60 top-notch papers available from the event. Here are just a few which look particularly interesting:

• Automating a Digital Special Collections Workflow Through Iterative Development
• Delivering a WOW User Experience: Do Academic Librarians Measure Up?
• From Embedded to Integrated: Digital Information Literacy and New Teaching Models for Academic Librarians
• QR Codes and the Library: The Library Audio Tour
• Book Lovers, Technophiles, Printers, and Pragmatists: The Social and Demographic Structure of User Attitudes Toward e-Books

Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet Project gave the keynote, How Libraries Add Value to Communities, at Computers in Libraries 2011 last week. “The Net, smartphones, and other technologies have added to the way people can engage with so much to local communities and wider communities of interest. Yet, there are many gaps. Lee Rainie…points to some findings of his Project that highlight areas where libraries and information services add value to the participants in their communities.”

via Stephen’s Lighthouse

Sarah Houghton-Jan, the LibrarianInBlack has shared the slides from her ALIA Information Online pre-conference session titled 3.0 tools without 3.0 million dollars. This presentation is chock-full of excellent free resources that budget-conscious libraries will want to take advantage of.

Slideshare, the presentation-sharing website has published it’s SlideShare Zeitgeist for 2010. This brief presentation reports on their findings. Heading into conference (and also Bibliographic Instruction) season, it’s good to know what the popular presentation trends were for the past year.

I gave a presentation today at the Online Information 2010 conference on Cloud Computing in Libraries. It ran about 25 minutes and touched on the 3 different types of cloud computing – SaaS, Paas, Iaas – and the different ways libraries are implementing these new services.

Aaron Schmidt, Digital Initiatives Librarian for the District of Columbia Public Library, shares his excellent slides presented at Internet Librarian 2010 on Content Strategy & Writing for the Web. This quick presentation is a great primer, or reminder for anyone seeking to improve their organization’s website.

LibrarianinBlack Sarah Houghton-Jan has posted her excellent slides from her 10 Steps to Mobile Supremacy for Libraries presentation. You can view the webinar with audio, or check out her Slideshare deck.

Cameron Chapman at the Noupe Design Blog gathers 40+ Awesome Keynote and PowerPoint Templates and Resources. These are all high-quality templates which are either available for free or minimal cost, and the list is followed up by further resources such as tuts for creating your own templates from scratch.

Deane Rimerman at ReadWriteWeb gathers the Top 10 Presentations About the Real-Time Web. All less than 9 months old, these are the most viewed presentations on the topic of the Real-Time Web, how organizations can leverage it to their advantage, and how designers plan to use it in the future.

via Stephen’s Lighthouse

I gave a brief workshop on Personal Branding: How to Create an Online Presence with my co-worker Megan Myers on Monday. We created a wiki with all of the info for the session and have made it public so feel free to check it out. Here’s the description of the workshop:

It is more important than ever to have an impressive online presence. This workshop session will provide tips for creating a personal brand portfolio which includes everything from your university webpage to your presence on popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You will learn how to discover what your personal brand currently consists of (yes, you are online in some capacity – discover what others can find out about you and how this effects your image), and how to develop strategies for branding success. We will discuss the “what and how” of posting to new social media websites and the ways in which that impacts how you are perceived online.