Ransomware – Bag of Tricks
The other day a friend of mine who is the director of a small rural library in another state emailed me. She was hoping I …
Technology
Short guides on ways new technology can help your professional development, improve your teaching, improve accessibility to your resources, improve your library, and help keep you organized.
Games For Change – Bag of Tricks
I have always been a video game player, way back since Pong, Asteroids, and Pacman as a matter of fact. Which is one of the …
Fighting Summer Slide – Bag of Tricks
Ah, summer… it is a busy time for libraries! Between the Summer Reading Program and the extra kids utilizing the library, keeping things manageable and …
Soup, well, TechSoup in the Bag of Tricks
Budgeting, finding the right solution, finding the person with the expertise to help, having the hardware, creating the plan…these are some of the issues libraries …
What was there? – Bag of tricks
I am amazed by the speed at which technology develops. I really am. New developments in capacity, speed, and materials lead to smaller, faster consumer …
Oral Histories and Audio recording – Bag of Tricks
I saw a meme the other day that said, “I’m sorry I didn’t answer my phone when you called. I don’t use it for that.” …
Making a habit of Habitica – Bag of Tricks
Habitica is an online task management application that, as its name implies, helps you build habits, end bad habits, and manage your daily, and weekly …
The Only Diagramming Tool You’ll Ever Need (And It’s Free!)
draw.io is an outstanding diagramming tool that works online or offline, and is completely free and open-source.
Big Huge Labs & Valentine’s Day – Bag of Tricks
Valentine’s Day, LOVE, or as the quote in the movie Princess Bride goes, “tweasure your wuv”. While the Children’s Librarian has probably already accumulated lots …
Data Visualization – Bag of Tricks
Ah January, the season of snow and reports! Often January is a month of getting your taxes together, making reports for the Board, and otherwise …
Photo Editing – Bag of Tricks
I do a bit of photo editing for websites and I have used a program called GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) for almost 20 years. …
Start Up a U/X Café at Your Library
Is traditional patron feedback not enough to help you make your library’s website amazing and accessible? It’s time to think outside the box and start a U/X Café!
IFTTT – Bag of Tricks
Have you heard the phrase, “the internet of things”? The Internet of Things is the network of devices, vehicles, and home appliances that contain electronics, …
Storybird – Bag of Tricks
The other day, my 12 year old niece sent me a pdf of a story she wrote. 100 typed pages. It ends not exactly on …
Broadband – Bag of Tricks
The internet is quite the thing. Since I have been alive, the internet has not only come into being but really changed how people interact …
Bag of Tricks – Money, Money, Money.
Basic financial literacy can be a great topic for a library program or class. But sometimes it can be intimidating to help patrons with financial …
Bag of Tricks – NewsGuard
Looking for unbiased and legitimate news sources on the internet can be a vexing task even for experienced reference librarians. A new resource I recently …
Essential Website UX to Improve Relevance, Value and Accessibility
This is a guest post by Tiffany Clendenin, Operations Manager at Broomfield Library. On a recent UX panel at CALCON, I presented on website content …
Bag of Tricks – Metaverse
“Augmented Reality (AR) is an interactive experience of a real-world environment whereby the objects that reside in the real-world are “augmented” by computer-generated perceptual information.” …
Libraries, Technology, and Disaster
Before I got the call from dispatch telling me we were under a pre-evacuation notice, I was standing in the yard to see where the …