Make it Matter @ #NCLA15

I've been very involved in the North Carolina Library Association 61st Biennial Conference, and I've been able to collaborate with my colleagues and students at UNC's School of Media & Journalism as part of that involvement.

I served as chair of the publicity committee, which involved all aspects of promotion for the conference. To start with, I asked two MEJO design students to create the conference logo, which was used on all of our material and on our conference bags:

Thanks, Katie King & Camille Romac-Gullo!

Katie King also designed our program and pre-conference brochure, and both look terrific.

I've also worked to promote the conference on social media and other methods -- and filled in content for the pre-conference brochure. Fortunately, my awesome colleague April Everett from the Rowan County Public Library filled in all the content for the final program. Follow the conference tweets at #ncla15.

At the conference, I collaborated with two colleagues from the Durham County Library to present a three-hour pre-conference session discussing the use of social media in libraries.  We primarily talked about using Twitter and Facebook (DurhamCountyLib is awesome on Twitter), and we covered issues such as content, social media clients, and control & coordination of the accounts. We also talked about social media policies, visibility, and analytics -- and we ended with a brief discussion of the other social media tools we use.

We created a guide with notes and links from the session: Social Media Hacks: Tips & Conversation for Enhancing Social Media Use in Libraries - and we had a great time talking to academic and public library colleagues across the state about using social media.

Finally, I had a poster session presenting results of my research with MEJO professor Jim Hefner: Does Forcing Students to Ask for Help Work? Assessing the Effect of REQUIRING Term Paper Consults The short answer is: YES, forcing students to ask for library help does work. See my earlier post Requiring Students to Meet with a Librarian for more details of that research.

Stephanie discusses the results with Brigitte Blanton, director of Greensboro Public Library.

It's been a great conference, and I'm thrilled to incorporate so much of my daily work into the association and the conference.