Meetings are a weekly – sometimes daily – ritual for many library administrators and staff. Learning to lead and participate effectively in meetings results in better preparation to get the most out of your time. How to plan and facilitate an effective meeting and employ strategies to combat common meeting problems are covered.

Learn some of the best time management principles to increase productivity and assess the value of tasks. Discover the benefits of creating goals and how productivity is tied to the ability to assess time and establish priorities.

While most know that documentation is crucial to the continuity and sustainability of processes in library work, it is still an easy thing to write off as too hard. Lessons from the field of technical writing can help prioritize these important tasks. Identify how to incorporate key tips from technical writers to make documentation creation more efficient and useful.

Zines, or noncommercial magazines, are increasingly collected by libraries as primary source documents relating to particular communities. Because of variuus factors such as frequent title changes, inconsistent publishing schedules, and pseudonomous creators, zines can be particularly challenging to properly catalog. This session will cover many common challenges relating to cataloging zines and offer solutions to these problems.

Authority control is the process of ensuring that all access points in a library catalog are used consistently, and it is a great help to patrons and library staff in identifying and locating library material. But it also can be overwhelming for librarians who are not familiar with it. This session covers the principles of authority control and the value that it brings to library users.

MarcEdit and OpenRefine are two powerful tools to help handle metadata clean-up issues. Detect misspellings and inaccuracies in your data and remedy them with OpenRefine. Quickly update large quantities of MARC records with MarcEdit. Learn to harness their power to work smarter, not harder.

Every beginning genealogist knows that Federal Census records are a great place to start searching for our ancestral history. However, we can learn more from records than just the places, dates, and names listed. Knowing the history and historical importance of data collected by census records is a necessary tool in every genealogist's kit. Gleaning information not indexed in a database can lead to major breakthroughs in your research. Learn how to sift through and interpret enumerator’s abbreviations as well as your ancestor's historical data.

Where do we come from? Researching our family history is becoming more popular with subscription services such as Ancestry.com and 23andMe ancestry kits. But what if we don’t want to spend a fortune answering this question? How can we find our ancestors without costly subscriptions? How can I confirm that my ancestors were from (insert country) or that the stories my great aunt tells are true? Knowing about free genealogy resources, both digital and physical, is one way to get started researching your genealogy.

Collaboration with faculty is a key component of librarians' jobs. Working with faculty on assignment design, instruction, student, support, programming initiatives, and research projects are a few of the ways in which librarians and faculty partner for student success. In this session, attendees will be introduced to best practices for working with faculty. Dr. Lauren Hays will share practical examples of how to approach collaboration and how to keep the momentum for collaborative projects.

Successful library signage brings new patrons into the library and assists them in finding needed information. Unsuccessful library signage is often unclear, cluttered, or ineffective. Improve patrons' experiences with guidance for evaluating library signage from the context of user experience and customer service.