1. June 4-5
Revel Hotel and Casino
2013 NJLA
Conference
Amanda, Bonnie and Katie’s Takeaways

2.  “15 Biggest Wikipedia Blunders.” Could be a good resource to
show students that you can‟t always trust Wikipedia.
 This program covered a lot of what we do already at Berkeley:
 Participate in New Student Orientation so that students see your
presence on campus.
 Work with professors to teach information literacy in classes.
 A big topic was helping students transition from Dewey Decimal
System to LOC, but we don‟t have this problem.
Giving College-Bound Students a
Head Start: Things You Need to
Know about Any College or
University

3. • Katie: I wasn‟t overly impressed. She said she has a deep connection
to libraries because her mom was a librarian. Other than that, her talk
was a long commercial for her books. I don‟t feel that she offered any
insight or advice that provoked.
• Bonnie: I found it interesting that she met her husband when they
were both reporters at the Baltimore Sun. Lippman‟s Tess Monaghan
books all take place in Baltimore as does her husband‟s HBO TV
series “The Wire.” During her talk, she mentioned her favorite book as
a child was Majorie Morningstar and that her mother was a librarian—
ME TOO!
• Amanda: For a best-selling author, I wasn‟t that impressed with her
talk!
Tuesday‟s Keynote: Laura
Lippman

4. Award-winning Author Jonathan Maberry gave a very intriguing talk about
Apocalyptic literature and why teens are drawn to it.
• 4 sub-genres: Pre-Apocalyptic, Apocalyptic, Post-Apocalyptic,
Dystopian.
• Teens are drawn to Zombie Apocalypse novels, The Hunger Games,
etc., not because they want to see how many people will die gory
deaths, but because they want to see how many people they can save.
They see themselves as the heroes, underdogs who may not be leaders
in normal society, but whose leadership skills take over in times of crisis.
• Maberry‟s novels include the four-part Rot and Ruin Series.
Teens at the End of
Time

5. Katie and Bonnie’s
Poster Session
Katie: It was great to be able to
interact with librarians from other
libraries around the state.
Everyone seemed really interested
in the technology tools (and not
necessarily the programming
aspect).
I even learned about tools I didn‟t
know about from people who I
talked to!

7. Katie and Bonnie’s
Poster Session
Bonnie: Many librarians were
interested and impressed about the
layout of the poster itself!
(Thank you )
The poster itself was a draw which
brought lots of traffic to our table
which created the opportunity to
discuss the content !

8. Reaching Online Learners: Tools to
Meet Their Needs
Presenter: Alyssa Valenti, Raritan Valley CC
Moderator: Bonnie Lafazan, Berkeley College
 Practical Tools for Reaching Students: Screenshots,
Screencasting and ScreenSharing
 What I liked about the presentation was the presenter
actually went through each tool and demonstrated how
they work and could be utilized.
 My favorite that I have tested out so far was
which I„m hoping we will have the opportunity to use with
our own LibChat proram. All you need is Java to work
with both parties browsers! (More to come from me on
this in a future Apps in the Stacks column)
 Besides the awesome tools I walked away with, I learned
other institutions too struggle browser and software
compatibility issues and blocking and access issues in
working with different types of technology tools, plugins
and software.

9. Reaching Online Learners: Tools to
Meet Their Needs
Presenter: Alyssa Valenti, Raritan Valley CC
Moderator: Bonnie Lafazan, Berkeley College
Amanda
I also attended this session and I thought another tool
that was very useful was Showmewhatswrong.com
Basically this is a screen sharing tool that you can
send users a link and it gives you access to their
screen so they can literally show you what they are
doing wrong and you can help them quicker.

10. • Bonnie: I loved everything Stephen Abrams had to say especially
about embracing new ideas, community engagement, library is about
US, the people, embracing the change, it's already here, how will you
deal with it? He also suggested that everyone take a MOOC--hey that
was our poster session suggestion!
• Amanda: I thought his keynote was very inspirational! He talked about
directions libraries should be going into. A few things that struck a cord
with me were:
• Librarians need to focus on professional services and not being
servants
• We need to “get over it” and embrace change
• Librarians need to collaborate more
• We need to think about the verbs of our library
• Our core skill is not delivering information it is improve the quality of the
question and the users experience.
Wednesday‟s Keynote: Steven
Abram

11. Three Strategies for Engaging
Students in Learning Information
Literacy
Amanda
• I attended this session where a librarian from Rider University presented on
an approach to IL that I thought was very interesting. Librarians were
testing out three different strategies to engage students and increase their
understanding of IL skills. They wanted to see which strategy would make a
greater impact.
• The three strategies were:
1. Assigning students to preview the class research guide before the IL session.
2. Including an interactive learning component.
3.Teaching multiple sessions.
• The results were that there was not a huge difference in understanding IL
skills better amongst the three strategies.
• It was disappointing to hear that but, I was definitely inspired to consider
trying something like this at our institution. I know there is no perfect model
and each set of students will have different skill levels but, we should
definitely be comparing and analyzing our teaching strategies.

12. What's the Big Deal About Library
Instruction? (Poster)
Amanda
This poster was created by the MLIS
Students at Rutgers. Their poster
focused on the importance of receiving
formal training for IL before they
graduate. They highlighted the
challenge, the current opportunities that
they have(or don‟t have) and how they
would like to further promote the
importance of IL experience to their
peers.
What I especially thought was interesting
about this topic was that the VALE
SIL(Shared Information Literacy)
committee that I am on thinks this is an
important issue as well. So important
that our committee presented on this at
VALE this past January. I plan on
bringing this info to my next VALE
meeting and hopefully my committee
and SCARLA can work together to

13. Bonnie‟s Poster Session with Former
Berkeley Librarian, Alyssa Valenti

14. Bonnie‟s Poster Session with Former
Berkeley Librarian, Alyssa Valenti
With all the talk of
Moocs out there in
academia, we
offered a positive
spin and proffered
that librarians should
take a MOOC as a
professional
development
opportunity!

16. Someone Tweeted about Bonnie
& Katie's Poster!

17. I presented a poster on this newsletter!
The poster was well received. All of my
handouts were taken by the end of the
day. Many librarians that stopped to chat
were very interested in the idea. I got the
feeling that not many libraries were taking
the time to do create internal newsletters.

18. Here is the
inside of the
handout that
Amanda
provided for her
poster session.

19. Amanda also presented on a
study that she conducted with
Matthew. The study focused on
how our English Faculty use the
library services. She had 20
people attend her session. Stay
tuned for the results of the study!

20. Berkeley Librarians!

21. Flickr Photo Stream of Conference
What else
happened at
the
conference?
Visit the NJLA
Flickr stream to
find out!
http://www.flickr.com/ph
otos/njla/