1.) Your Name and Title:

Michael Schofield

Web Services Librarian

2.) Library, School, or Organization Name:

Alvin Sherman Library

Nova Southeastern University

3.) Area of the World from Which You Will Present:

Ft. Lauderdale, FL

USA

4.) Language in Which You Will Present:

English

5.) Target Audience(s):

Web or Digital Librarians and Designers

6.) Short Session Description (one line):

Leverage the best practices of future friendly (#FFLY) web design specifically against library user experience studies to better push sites to the patron's point of need: the palm of his or her hand - and tablet (wait, which one?), laptop, desktop, TV (what!?), and more. 

7.) Full Session Description (as long as you would like):

It is still important to aspire to a "library without walls:" this is the noble ambition that even today inspires the offline library to virtualize and hop on Facebook. A couple years ago, we enthusiastic web-peeps couldn't anticipate the myriad of web-ready things proliferating the 2012 market. We knew smartphones would get cheaper and that, one day, there would be more affordable tablets than the iPad. I'm not sure we envisioned the web-ready toaster or the scale that tweets your weight. It will only get worse!

We have to start by being honest: libraries in general have not had an easy time staying current with the web. Librarians tend to curate text-heavy websites that are a pain to navigate and we're often surprised when users can't understand libraryspeak. Now, just when we have largely hopped on the bandwagon and gotten enthusiastic about being online, our users expect a library's site to look and perform great on everything. When we trade-in our walls we're given a gajillion glass windows.

Unfortunately, meeting our patrons at their point-of-need--whether an itsy-bitsy netbook or a steroidal phone--could demand innumerable staff hours. But a library can only avoid the redesign so long before precious statistics start to fall. 

The web is gravitating toward responsive web design to accommodate the issues presented by so many screens, so many browsers, different resolutions, and bandwidth. We're going to follow suit

This session is informed by library- and mobile-website usability studies and will survey best practices for responsive design in order to encourage librarians and staff involved with their site to anticipate innumerable points of access. We'll discuss really cool tools and research, devolve into geek-driven banter, showcase some stellar websites, and have a good time: the web is fun and libraries present unique challenges.