This list represents the accepted conference talks that you can expect to hear at the conference. Thank you to all who submitted talks this year.
We build software to solve problems, but understanding users’ problems is not a trivial task. Because we love writing code, it’s tempting to begin designing solutions too early in the process. In this presentation, we will share a real-life example of how we took a user-centered approach to designing a... more
"Regardless of your role -- manager, developer, public services type, etc. -- systems thinking is a critical skill for improving your own work and your organization. Systems analysis allows us to introspect on our work, to recognize incipient failures, to diagnose systemic problems, and to optimize workflows. But how do... more
"When redesigning a website, it’s important to make sure the content is what the audience wants. Recently, we decided to refresh the homepage at our academic library, and wanted to start with the question “what do students actually want to see on the homepage?”. An incredibly low-tech, low cost... more
You are attending - or teaching - a workshop on the latest tech hotness. The ad said it was "For Beginners -- No Experience Necessary". You get there and a third of the attendees don't have the right equipment and software, a third are on the verge of tears,... more
"This talk will aim to briefly address how a DevOps Engineer recommends analyzing and dealing technical debt (with the use of real life use cases) and then on the flip side, provide the take on how a project manager addresses dealing with technical debt. Technical debt can refer to... more
"Librarians build many digital library repositories to store and manage their collections. They also develop analysis tools to analyze user activities and understand how the users using their service. With the rapid development of the cloud computing, we can build these tools more efficiently and don’t need to implement... more
"Let's talk about call numbers. As library coders, many of us find them oddly alluring. They're compact and information-dense. Simple, yet structured. Not to mention handy! Need a virtual shelflist? A shelf-reading tool? A way to do collection analysis? Just pull your call numbers out of your ILS and... more
"Although libraries have spent many years discussing and preparing for it, linked data in our library catalogs remains an overwhelming and confounding technology to many, including the technical services staff creating and maintaining catalog data. Using a philosophy of project based learning and iterative experimentation, NCSU Libraries conducted a... more
FOLIO’s design puts the “platform” in “library services platform”. Everything from initializing the first tenant on the platform to upgrading the circulation business logic module to adding a line in an order is handled with a well-defined RESTful API. What new service could you create if the details of... more
Controlling environmental conditions is an important tool used in preserving archives and manuscripts; in combination with HVAC systems, independent datalogger devices collect measurements such as temperature and relative humidity. This talk will detail the presenter’s construction of a do-it-yourself datalogger using the Raspberry Pi and compare its performance against... more
Objects in the Stanford Digital Repository are versioned and backed up, but our object recovery process has been … challenging. Our digital preservation processes are optimized for “write once; read never." To address our digital preservation gaps, we are creating a proactive audit process for preserved data and we... more
"Library transactional data from chat transactions and subject metadata in checkout clusters represent hugely untapped areas for innovation. Two recent projects at a research library have highlighted the applicability of machine learning methods to reveal trends in large sets of library transactional data. This presentation will detail the machine... more
Learn how to leverage open source tools like Python, Pandas, Seaborn, and Tensor Flow/Keras to develop machine learning frameworks for your library. We’ll share simple workflows that we have developed to combine sensor data from access control gates, computer visions systems, and data science methods to develop predictive models... more
Deep convolutional neural networks have led to breakthrough results in numerous machine learning tasks such as the classification of images in huge data sets, like ImageNet ; they have provided the framework for unsupervised control-policy-learning in the mastering by computers of sample human tasks, like Atari games; and have... more
The National Archives has several partnerships with organizations digitizing our records. Once we received the digitized images and metadata back, we faced a significant challenge of transforming that metadata to match our data model for upload to the National Archives Catalog. This led staff of our Office of Innovation... more
"Libraries have a complicated relationship with data. We believe that patrons must have privacy while using library services and resources, but the systems we use collect patron data that is highly sought after for analytics, marketing, and assessment needs for internal and external audiences. Libraries are then left to... more
"Library search tools are littered with algorithms that determine what a search ""means"" and what items are ""relevant,"" among other things. Evaluating these algorithms is hard, because their workings are unknown. The algorithms are the major intellectual property asset of the software vendors, and how they work is protected... more
"Content reuse, defined as how often and in what ways digital library materials are utilized and repurposed, is a key indicator of the impact and value of a digital collection. However, traditional library analytics focus almost entirely on simple access statistics, which do not show how users utilize or... more
In our daily lives, we are awash in data, visualizations and analysis. Libraries, too, recognize the potential power in expressing our collections and their content as data, and we've made some strides in putting this data online to be downloaded, manipulated, recombined, and analyzed. But who is actually using... more
"Wikidata, the newest project of the Wikimedia Foundation, has been increasingly attracting contributors from all over the world. Wikidata is a free knowledge base that stores multilingual structured linked data. At the IUPUI University Library, we are working on a project where our goal is to provide a presence... more
Hear about our process to greatly increase the likelihood of making the first match the “best” match for most string matches. When we were automatically reconciling lists of strings representing entities from bibliographic metadata against a range of target vocabularies for a project, we found that we could use... more
Does your library have important analytics you would like to share with others but you are not sure where to begin? Do you have existing reports you would like to compare to reveal patterns, trends, and associations but they are in different formats? This presentation shows a unique approach... more
Macromedia (and later, Adobe) Flash was ubiquitous with the web in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as webseries like Homestar Runner can attest. However, the web's evolution has left Flash by the wayside, culminating in Adobe's recent announcement to cease support for Flash by he end of 2020.... more
Web archiving is often undertaken at scale by public and private memory institutions, academic researchers, and the Internet Archive. However, individuals and non-institutional communities also have a stake in documenting particular experiences of the live web: as collectors building our own archives; as subjects represented via captured websites; and... more
In 2016 the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, in cooperation with the Smithsonian Office of the Chief Information Officer, embarked on a project to develop an online streaming video player capable of delivering audiovisual assets from 19 Smithsonian museum collections to the public. This talk... more
"There are a number of resources such as PBCore and AE-57 for defining metadata specifications for a digitization project, but there are very few resources on how to ensure that the metadata you receive meets your specifications. This presentation outlines an approach taken using JSON Schema to validate the... more