EMEA Keynote - Dr. Caleb Kibet

What constitutes effective project management? Why is it so useful for information professionals to become familiar with and conversant in the processes of project management? This initial overview addresses the benefits and value of project management skills and a context for the rest of the webinar and the discussions that follow. Maureen Adamson will review major approaches from predictive to agile, core concepts, language and terminology as background. We will also review the overall structure of the rest of the webinar, starting with simple projects with clear goals as a foundational understanding, to be followed by more complex projects and situations later in the webinar.

This event will look at bias awareness and the difficulties of appropriately valuing diversity in a work environment. What are the implications for the library in terms of data collection, recruitment practices, and mentoring? How might library leadership encourage applicants from a broad spectrum of cultural backgrounds while avoiding any appearance of double standards? How might technology jobs in the library be made more appealing to a greater range of applicants?

The Seamless Access project continues to move forward in an effort to make federated authentication easier for users through the development of its own service, and also through efforts to improve the overall world of federated authentication. This session will start with an overview of how Seamless Access makes federated authentication a better experience while also working to make it more privacy protecting for users. The session will then use a case study to re-examine the remote access experience through the eyes of a library that navigated a shift to majority (or exclusive) remote access. How did their traditional access workflows hold up, what worked - and what didn’t? What does this imply for the access technologies and best practices that libraries should consider for the future? Anyone interested in electronic resource access, authentication, user experience, and the future of authentication should attend!

Faced with a highly diverse combination of externally and internally collected data (web visits, gate counter, collection usage, subject analysis, budgets, space use, reference help interactions, etc.), academic libraries have rapidly mastered the value and use of analytics. Whether analyzing prospective subscription packages to determine their value for an institution’s research activities or reviewing usage data drawn from the local digital repository, libraries want to extract meaning from the increasing volume of library data. What does that data look like? How should that data be managed? And in what combinations is that data most enlightening?