IDEAS CITY 2013: The Future City

If you happen to be in New York City on May 1-4, check out the IDEAS CITY festival created to explore the future city. Started in 2011 by the New Museum, the festival is a collaboration between various art, education, and community organizations to imagine our future around this year’s theme: Untapped Capital.

StreetFest, in conjunction with IDEAS CITY, is a street fair along the Bowery with people presenting models, projects and public events.

Field Trips: LinkedIn and Google

As you may know, we are fans of Google and LinkedIn. We use them in our work and talk about them in our leadership and career development presentations.

Recently, we went on field trips to the NYC offices of LinkedIn and Google. We started off a windy and rainy day with a tour of LinkedIn in the morning, followed by a tour of Google in the afternoon.

With LinkedIn’s open office design and relaxed, quiet atmosphere, it is clear why they are such a productive company.

Google’s office on the other hand is fun, social, and sophomoric. You can literally feel the buzz of exciting young minds working together in this powerhouse company.

Thanks LinkedIn and Google for enjoyable visits.

SparkTruck is on its way to NYC!

It’s a bird, it’s a plane…..it’s  

Jumping on the bandwagon, errr truck wagon, SparkTruck delivers education on wheels.  Traveling across the USA with 21st-century shop tools, SparkTruck is on a mission to spread the fun of hands-on learning.

Keep an eye out, NYC – SparkTruck is due in the New York metro area, September 23-30.

Leveraging LinkedIn for Your Career – SLA-NY Event Recap

On Wednesday, I attended a great presentation on “Leveraging LinkedIn for Your Career” by Brian Tietje, Strategic Account Executive at LinkedIn (and professional envelope pusher — from his LinkedIn profile headline). The event was organized by the New York Chapter of the Special Libraries Association (SLA-NY).

Sandra and I are big fans of LinkedIn (as you may know from our leadership and career development presentations and blog posts). Being a LinkedIn fan, I was glad that I learned some new things and not-so-new things from a different perspective:

• Update your LinkedIn profile according to your professional/career objectives.
• You can create a company page on LinkedIn, for free.
• Make a good first impression: use the headline space of your profile. Don’t just put your job title — that’s what we said about name tags and on maximizing LinkedIn.
• Your summary section = your elevator pitch. Make it count. Highlight your role and career experience.
• When it comes to LinkedIn recommendations, be specific in your recommendation request. Tell them what you want to be recommended for. Don’t have more than 3-5 recommendations displayed on your profile (Brag, but not too much).
• Weed your LinkedIn connections at least once a year.
• You can join up to 50 LinkedIn groups, but do you really want to be part of so many groups? Think quality over quantity. Feel free to test drive groups.
• As a LinkedIn member, you get 5 introductions per month to use within your network. Get an introduction to the person you need to reach. You may share similar professional interests with this person or this person works at a company that you’re interested in.
• When you search your network, you can save those searches and create weekly alerts.
• Participate in Answers. It’s a way to share your knowledge as a professional in your field.
• LinkedIn Today, news headlines (which I enjoy reading and sharing) comes from a few places: LinkedIn’s editorial team and what your network and industry are sharing.
• Keep an eye on your profile stats. This helps gauge the impact of your LinkedIn profile. Are people finding or looking at your profile?
• LinkedIn recently acquired Slideshare (we’re big fans of Slideshare too).

For more tips on leveraging LinkedIn for your career, check out Brian’s presentation slides on the SLA-NY website.

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The one LinkedIn tip that Sandra and I keep sharing in our presentations (so we’re going to share it here as well): 

When you send an invitation to connect with someone on LinkedIn, please customize your message.

The default message is “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.”, which is fine to use, in addition to your message. We can’t tell you how many times people just send us the default message. You wouldn’t just walk up to someone, give them your business card and then walk away — would you? Don’t do that on LinkedIn.

Customize your message. It can be something as simple as “We have similar professional interests: x,y,z.”. Remind them if you met in-person at an event, worked together on a project or were in the same class together.

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What are your tips for using LinkedIn? Share them in the comments section below. 

Recap of METRO Workshop: DIY Usability & User Experience

DIY Usability & User Experience: Is Your Library People Focused?

With budget cuts and staff shortages, libraries are asked to do more with less. As a result, libraries are increasingly using technology, self-service models and other trends to make services and processes more efficient. What tends to be overlooked is how these implementations affect the overall library experience for patrons and staff. Is it really more efficient and efficiency at what cost? Whether your library is looking to renovate, relocate, rebrand, or introduce a new service/program, people-centered design is crucial to the process.

In this DIY-style workshop, you will learn to how use people-centered design methods at your library to help you plan, coordinate, assess and evaluate your services and processes to ensure that they are cost- and time-efficient. While you may not have the staff, time, or funding to do a full-fledged library usability and user experience study; together, participants will experience how to use these methods to make small changes for a big impact. Filled with examples, case studies, and activities, participants will leave this workshop with the framework and tools for completing their own DIY usability study.

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