Search

Librarian Design Share

inspiration for library creatives

Open Search
Tag

tablets

PowerPoint to Impress

When the Senior Vice President makes 3 hours in his schedule to tour your library and talk to each department and staff member, you have to come up with something to impress him. We originally thought he could visit departments and individuals, and they could give him handouts of their stats and information while telling him more about their day-to-day actions. And then it hit us that we’re the library; we should strive to make our presentation to him as forward-thinking and eye-catching as we can, and we should make the experience as real as possible.

So, we assigned roles and scenarios to the VP so that he could experience the library as our patrons might, and along the way we could give him the behind-the-scenes view into what we do that makes their experience here so easy.  To show off our technology skills (and our stats), we devised a PowerPoint from pictures that we’ve taken of our library. We used SkyDrive to load it to a library iPad and presented it to him when he arrived.  The VP took the iPad to each department, which kept him on track with scenarios, and it kept our numbers right in front of him.  Here it is:

We uploaded the presentation to SlideShare and sent him the link before he could even get back to his office.  Impressed does not begin to describe his reaction.

Interested in modifying this presentation for your own library? Contact me for the original file.

4

Same Design, New Use

A few months back, I went to a resource fair in my institution, and another department had an interesting giveaway that I hadn’t seen before: an iPad cleaner.  Of course, this is really nothing more than a large eyeglasses shammy, but by putting it into the trendy context of an iPad or a tablet cleaner, it became THE swag to snag.

So, of course, I decided that my library needed to get in on this and make our own cleaner for the next opportunity we have to give things away.  I started with a simple, basic design, like the one that I picked up, but before long, I realized that we could use a design that was already in circulation…our tablet handout.  The iPad layout fits perfectly to the 5 1/2 x 7″ size of cloth.  The only change I needed to make to the design was to include our tablet site’s web address and QR code at the bottom so that patrons could find the site we were advertising (the tablet handout was two-sided with that information on the back, and the cleaning cloth can only be printed on one side).

iPad cleaner

You may notice that our tablet site’s image changed a bit since the last post, but we have committed to keeping this design for at least a year, so we ordered 500 of these babies at about $1.50 a piece through our institution’s vendor, and we think they’ll be a big hit!

What are you guys giving out to patrons this fall?

Contact me if you want the original Publisher file for this design.

2

Legal Research on the Go

Our goal here at Librarian Design Share is to be able to inspire you with creative ideas so that you can take them back and modify them for your own use in your library.  David McClure, Head of Research and Curriculum Services at the Wiener-Rogers Law Library at the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, had done just this, and we’re so impressed with the results.

unlvs1

unlvs2

Here is David’s description of the design process:

For some time, our library had considered various ways to share information on legal research apps with our students and faculty.  While reviewing the ALL-SIS Task Force on Library Marketing & Outreach’s Academic Law Library Marketing & Outreach Toolkit, I ran across a reference to the Librarian Design Share blog.  The January 23, 2013, post on “Advertising a Tablet Page” provided the creative spark (and the template) to make the handout a reality.  We converted the template from Publisher to Pages format, and we increased the image size to create a full-page handout.   

Special thanks to April Aultman Becker and the Librarian Design Share blog for sharing the Publisher template with us.  Library research assistants Jessica Perlick, Elizabeth Ellison, and Andrew Stagg also contributed their excellent research and design skills, along with their creativity and enthusiasm, to the project.   

A PDF version of the handout is available for download through the Scholarly Commons @ UNLV Law at http://scholars.law.unlv.edu/refdeskguides/8.  For the Pages version, please contact David McClure (david.mcclure@unlv.edu).

David mentioned that this was his first project with Pages and that he enjoyed the program’s flexibility when it came to manipulating images.  Anyone else out there using Pages?  We’d love to see!

0

Advertising a Tablet Page

ipad front

When our staff developed a tablet page to highlight our mobile resources, we wondered how we would advertise it.  It finally became apparent that the very best way to advertise an iPad or other device was by using the image of the device itself.  What’s more eye-catching than a tablet?

I made a handout that is two sided: the front is an image of our actual tablet page as if you were holding and viewing it (I just layered a screen shot of the page over an iPad image–that’s what you see above), and a little more information and QR code on the back side (see the image below).  I print four of these per page to save some trees, and they are always popular at our Information Desk.

ipad back

The topic buttons on the handout were created by Laurissa Gann, Outreach Librarian at MD Anderson Research Medical Library.  If you would like the Publisher document for this handout, contact April Aultman Becker.

3

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑