Time: 11:30 – 12:30 pm

Location: P-213 Palace Road Building, Simmons College, 300 The Fenway, Boston, MA

R.S.V.P. at http://digitalmediapres.eventbrite.com/

We are hosting an ASIS&T webinar on the Challenges of Digital Media Preservation. The description for the event is below:

Preserving digital audio and video files present their own unique challenges, which become particularly difficult in an archive that is constantly in use. WGBH has been attempting to manage this problem for over 10 years. With producers currently delivering born digital files, trying to keep up with the technology keeps the archive scrambling. New workflows, file naming, organizational standards, and flexible systems to accommodate a wide range of incoming media are all needed. WGBH, with the support from NEH, is currently looking at utilizing an open source system called Hydra to help solve some of the challenges.

Please R.V.S.P.!

Time: 2:00 – 4:00 pm

Location: P-207 Palace Road Building, Simmons College, 300 The Fenway, Boston, MA

R.S.V.P. at http://deskset.eventbrite.com/.

It’s the end of the semester! Join us for a relaxing social to unwind, enjoy some pizza and snacks, and indulge in some library-related entertainment!

(Come after PLG and SCIRRT‘s GSLIS Swap-O-Rama, which will be from 12:30 – 2:00 pm in the Student Lounge!)

We will be viewing of the classic film Desk Set starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy! The plot centers around librarian Bunny Watson who is in charge of a corporate library. As the company plans to introduce “electronic brains” — computers, that is — into the library, the staff must grapple with the implications that new technology holds for their profession. Sound familiar? This 1957 film illustrates that the ever-present theme of technology and libraries colliding is a perennial concern.

Please R.V.S.P.! Food and snacks will be provided.

Time: 2:00 – 3:00 pm

Location: P-111 (Dean’s Conference Room), Palace Road Building, Simmons College, 300 The Fenway, Boston, MA

Registration: Free and open to all! Click here to register.

Ever participated in social tagging, wikis, hackathons, or even just a group project? Or have you conducted research using focus groups or a Delphi method? “Crowdsourcing” and “collaboration” are important concepts in research and ideation (idea generation).

Join Simmons ASIS&T and the GSLIS Doctoral Program for a presentation about Group Ideation and Deliberation Activities. Dr. Lu Xiao will discuss four projects (completed and ongoing) about understanding and supporting group ideation and deliberation activities.

1. The first project looks at the effects of knowing other members’ rationales in small group ideation activities.
2. The second project examines the effects of knowing previous workers’ rationales in ideation activities through online crowdsourcing (Amazon’s Mechanical Turk).
3. The third project focuses on understanding and supporting small group deliberation.
4. The fourth project studies large-scale online deliberation (Wikipedia’s Articles for Deletion discussions) and explore a computational linguistic approach to facilitate deliberation processes and improve deliberation outcome.

Light refreshments will be served.

Dr. Lu Xiao is an assistant professor at the University of West Ontario in London, Ontario. Her research group is the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Lab at the Faculty of Information & Media Studies (FIMS). Her research focuses on the design and evaluation of information technologies that support collaboration and learning.

Questions or comments? Please contact asist@simmons.edu.

Time: 4:15 – 5:45 pm

Location: P-207, Palace Road Building, Simmons College, 300 The Fenway, Boston, MA

Registration: Free and open to all! Click here to register.

The User Experience Professional Association @ Simmons (UXPA) is presenting a student panel!

This is your chance to discover what your fellow students are doing in usability research! Come join us for a panel of student usability researchers, and see what kinds of work you can do as a usability researcher, and what usability research can do for you! Our panelists will be discussing four different projects:

Quick Turnaround Testing: UX Research in a Corporate Context by Dan Zavala

UX research in a company is typically performed frequently and with a quick turnaround. Often stakeholders would request results and recommendations immediately after you complete the tests. This presentation will share experiences in managing multiple projects and producing usability deliverables efficiently and effectively.

Mobile Usability Testing and Tools by Graham Herrli

How should you design and test mobile device usability? I try to answer this by reviewing the literature about mobile and the tools available for testing. Can you test a mobile device in a stationary setting?

Pilot Testing Suma: An Open Source Toolkit for Assessment by Elizabeth Quigley

Libraries often struggle with how to collect usage data and turn it into statistics for assessment projects. Suma is an open source toolkit created by NCSU that eases data collection and provides analysis. I’ve been piloting Suma at Snell Library at Northeastern this semester to determine if it is a viable solution for usage data collection long term.

Designing Usability Testing for Dataverse by Eric Gibbs and Lin Lin

Dataverse is a software application that allows researchers to upload and share data they’ve collected in their studies. Lin and Eric have been working to determine the Harvard version’s strengths and weaknesses in how it allows researchers to both upload and search for data.

Time: 2:00 am – 3:00 pm

Registration: http://www.asis.org/Conferences/webinars/Webinar-Curran-3-27-2013-register.html

Cost: FREE for ASIS&T Members, $25 for non-members

The Education Special Interest Group (SIG) of the national ASIS&T organization is offering a webinar that may be of interest to you!

This webinar on the teaching responsibilities of academic librarians is offered at the urgings of observers who note two things: academic librarians do lots of teaching and many academic librarians approach this task with little training in teaching.  Therefore, this session will examine those aspects of Information Literacy (IL) that impact teaching responsibilities—the “so what?” of the Google Age, the proficiencies academic librarians must acquire in order to make IL happen, and the partnerships with faculty that academic librarians must forge.  The webinar will present some specific recommendations for professors who train MLIS students to be academic librarians and for the MLIS students, themselves.

Time: 8:30 am – 5:30 pm

Location: C-101, Main College Building, Simmons College, 300 The Fenway, Boston, MA

The Simmons College Student Chapter of the Society of American Archivists (SCoSAA) is excited to present the 2nd Annual Graduate Symposium!

Keynote Speaker Professor Martha Mahard and several panels of student presenters will touch on topics of ethics, art, technology and “third place” within the larger context of Libraries, Archives, History and Museums.

ASIS&T is pleased to co-sponsor the Technology Panel, which will include three presenters:

1. Digitization and Audio Cassettes: Looking for Archival Standards – Derek Jackson
2. Tools for the Past/Tools for the Future; Using the electronic book and re-photographic techniques to showcase the library, archives and museum’s treasures – James Gehrt
3. William Caxton: The Merchant Printer – Brian Shetler

Registration

Registration is FREE!

Please register here so we know how much food to order.

Thanks to the generous donations of PLG, ALA-SC, Panopticon, LISSA, ASIS&T, UXPA, SLA, and SCoSAA, breakfast, lunch, and snacks will be provided throughout the day!

Volunteers Needed!

SCoSAA is seeking volunteers for moderating panels, providing technology support during the Symposium, blogging/reporting on panels (click here for last year’s reports), helping with the welcome/registration table, and other opportunities. If you are interested in volunteering for any of these positions, please contact Aliza Leventhal (aliza.leventhal@simmons.edu) or Rosalie Gartner (rosalie.gartner@simmons.edu).

Agenda

8:30 – 9:00	Registration and Breakfast
9:00 – 9:45	Keynote Speaker
9:45 – 10:00	Keynote Questions
10:00 – 10:15	Coffee Break
10:15 – 11:30	Panel 1: Technology
12:00 – 1:00	Lunch (in Special Functions Room on 1st floor of the Main Campus Building)
1:00 – 2:00	Panel 2: Art
2:00 – 2:15	Coffee Break
2:15 – 3:30	Panel 3: Third Space
3:30 – 3:45	Coffee Break
3:45 – 5:15	Panel 4: Ethics
5:15 – 5:30	Closing Remarks

Time: 4:30 – 5:30 pm

Location: P-207, School of Management Bldg, Simmons College, 300 The Fenway, Boston, MA

REMINDER! The “U” in UXD (see description) has been rescheduled and is now taking place on Thursday, March 28.

Register: http://uxdbylhood.eventbrite.com/

Time: 8:30 – 12:30 pm

Location: M-501, School of Management Bldg, Simmons College, 300 The Fenway, Boston, MA

Register: http://neasist-ebooks.eventbrite.com

NOTE: Student registration is $15, but the first ten (10) Simmons GSLIS students to sign up get free registration. Please check your e-mail for the message from asistlist@simmons.edu or contact asist@simmons.edu for more info.

Digitally publishing your own work is powerful and empowering. Surprisingly, creating ebooks with text, images, audio and hyperlinks is neither complicated nor expensive. By using EPUB, anyone can create an ebook, from elementary school students to university instructors.

Come hear about an exciting project on open-source online textbook creation, a discussion about the latest EPUB standard which supports wildly innovative e-publishing capabilities, and a demonstration of open-source publishing tools you can use to publish your own creative content.

Program

“Open-Source Online Textbooks”

Speaker: Dustin A. Lewis, H20 Project Manager and Technical Lead

Dustin will introduce us to a new suite of online classroom tools called H2O, developed and provided by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society in collaboration with the Harvard Law School Library. H2O allows professors to freely develop, remix, and share online textbooks under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

“Shifting Forward in Digital Publishing: EPUB 3″

Speaker: Nettie Lagace, Associate Director of Programs at NISO

Nettie will provide an overview of EPUB 3, a standard which, while tightly integrated to Web standards, also offers many innovations, including support for rich media, interactivity, global language support, and styling and layout enhancements. EPUB 3 advances capabilities for better accessibility and more and richer metadata, thereby improving discoverability and the user experience.

“Creating Ebooks Using Open-Source Tools”

Speaker: Karie Kirkpatrick, Journals Technology Specialist at The MIT Press

Karie will provide an overview of open-source tools that you can use to convert your PDF or Word document into an ebook-either as an EPUB file or as a Kindle (MOBI) file. This presentation will focus on the PDFMasher conversion tool, the Sigil EPUB interface, and the Calibre ebook management tool.

Agenda

Agenda

• 8:15am – 9:00am
  Registration/Light Breakfast
• 9:00am – 9:15am
  Welcome/Introduction
• 9:15am – 10:00am
  Dustin A. Louis
• 10:00am – 10:45am
  Nettie Lagace
• 10:45am – 11:00am
  Break
• 11:00am – 11:45am
  Karie Kirkpatrick
• 11:45am – 12:30pm
  Panel Discussion

Time: 4:30 – 5:30 pm

Location: M-501/M-502, School of Management Bldg, Simmons College, 300 The Fenway, Boston, MA

User Experience Design (UXD) is an approach to design that focuses on the needs, goals, and behaviors of the intended users. An essential part of the UXD process involves conducting field research with the target users to gather requirements, inform the design, and maximize usability. Whether one is designing a product, service, web site, information space, or process, user research helps create a foundation for success.

In this session, L Hood will discuss how to plan and carry out user research and provide an overview of field methods such as ethnographic studies, contextual inquiry, collaging, and roundtable usability testing.

Speaker: L Hood, Sr Manager of UXD and Information Design at ACI Worldwide, has been practicing UXD for 13+ years and has conducted hundreds of user research sessions with users all over the world. She has an M.A. in Technical & Professional Writing from Northeastern University, an M.S. in Human Factors in Information Design from Bentley University, and is in her first semester in the M.S. in Library & Information Science program at Simmons College.

Register: http://uxdbylhood.eventbrite.com/

Time: 5:15 pm

Location: The Asgard Irish Pub & Restaurant, 350 Mass. Ave., Cambridge, MA

This event is part of the Spring of Digital Humanities, an initiative started by the GSLIS Allen Smith Visiting Scholar, Professor John Unsworth. Meet with scholars, students, developers, artists, and other professionals to discuss the latest DH trends and technologies.

For more information, visit New England Digital Humanities.