SLIS WORKSHOP CATALOG

The following is an alphabetical list and description of workshops offered by the School of Library and Information Science through the KSU College of Continuing Studies.

The ABC's of Emergent Literacy: The Building Blocks for Infusing Early Literacy Strategies into Preschool Storytimes.
The purpose of this workshop is to inform youth services library practitioners and pre-service practitioners of emergent literacy basics, the role that librarians play in preschoolers' literacy development, and examples of children's literature that facilitate demonstration of basic skills in emergent literacy development. Students will look at and practice incorporating specific strategies within preschool storytimes and will create a six-week series of programs that infuses emergent literacy strategies.

* Student cannot receive credit for both this workshop and the workshop Library Programming for Families with Young Children.

Access to Government Documents Online
Government documents contain a wealth of information that is seldom tapped by researchers and librarians. Sign up for this workshop to gain a basic working knowledge of these documents, methods for accessing them, and an explanation of how the materials are arranged.

All About AV: A Comprehensive Overview
This workshop will provide an understanding of audio-visual materials, including videos, DVD's, CD-ROM's, CD's, cassettes, and books on tape/CD. Participants will learn what comprises a good audio/visual collection, how to select materials, and what sources and vendors can be used to gather materials. By workshop's end, participants will be proficient at assembling and maintaining an audio-visual collection.

All Politics are Local: Librarian as Political Activist, Policy Maker, and Library Advocate
By enrolling in this workshop, students will have a greater knowledge of the local, state, and federal political processes that affect libraries. Participants will be able to analyze library policy using standard-form analysis and compare and contrast local policy decisions to policy making at the state and national levels. Participants will also acquire the skills to effectively communicate library issues to elected officials and to organize a library advocacy campaign.

Archival Description:  DACS, MARC, and EAD

This workshop will introduce participants to the three standards central to archival description: Describing Archives:  A Content Standard (DACS), Machine Readable Cataloging (MARC), and Encoded Archival Description (EAD).   Students will gain knowledge of how archival collections are organized and described, and learn the key components of archival finding aids (including biographies and administrative histories, scope and content notes, and other elements specific to archival description).  They will then generate electronic versions of these descriptions in both MARC and EAD formats.

Audiovisual Archiving

This workshop targets students and professionals who would like an introduction to the issues and challenges of preserving moving image and sound material.  Through a combination of lecture, demonstrations, and discussion, participants will be introduced to the core concerns of moving image and sound archiving, including basics of film and magnetic media care and handling, methods of preservation and restoration (for both analog and digital media), approaches to restoration, systems of description and retrieval for archival audiovisual material, and ways to provide access to audiovisual media.

Basics of BI Planning
Learn the theoretical and practical aspects of educating library users in library research skills. You will become familiar with the why, the when, and the how of user education, learning the applications and considerations related to specific environments such as electronic instruction, remote instruction, and instruction for particular types of libraries. In addition, you will discuss management issues, program planning, and methods of needs assessment for bibliographic instruction.

Cataloging Non-Print and AV Children's Materials Update
This workshop will focus on cataloging children's educational AV, non-print (realia, manipulatives, puppets) and assistive technology resources. Emphasis will be on cataloging for the K-12 setting or a children's library. Participants will gain knowledge of descriptive cataloging for educational and children's materials and resources to assist them in increasing access to these materials through application of cataloging principles.

Cataloging of Non-print Material: Video Recordings, Sound Recordings, and Computer Files
This workshop will provide an overview of the process of describing and providing adequate access to non-book materials in a library. Participants will become aware of the relevant Anglo-American Cataloging Rules and MARC format documentation which apply to the cataloging of video recordings, sound recordings, and computer software. By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to provide descriptive cataloging and access points for these various types of non-print materials.  * Students enrolled in this worskhop should have an understanding of AACRII and MARC documentation. 

Cataloging Internet Resources
With the advent and widespread adoption of the Internet and the WWW, there are more demands for organizing / cataloging Internet resources and making them available through online catalogs. This workshop examines the similarities and differences between print and Internet bibliographic records. This workshop emphasizes developing the skills for creating bibliographic records for Internet resources using national standards, such as AACR2 and MARC. Participants will become familiar with bibliographic elements and MARC fields used to describe Internet resources.

Children's Literature Themes and Perspectives Explored Through Literary Text Sets, Paired Books, and Realia Sets
The purpose of this workshop is to explore the definition of, variety of, and uses for text sets, paired books, and realia sets in a variety of subject areas. Students will learn about literary text sets, paired books, and realia sets and what research states about them. Students will also explore subject areas in which they are beneficial; how to assemble text sets, paired books, and realia sets; and how to present them to children in read aloud, book talks, and in displays.

Children's Literature Update
Sharing, evaluating, and compiling a bibliography of recent publications in the field of children's literature is just one aspect of this workshop. Participants will also learn about recent releases in children's literature and receive suggestions for their use. In addition, this workshop will introduce the annual recommended reading and award lists and give participants experience in utilizing selection tools for evaluating children's materials. Finally, students will learn how to acquire promotional materials to provide programming ideas for newer titles.

Children's Poetry Pizzazz
During this workshop, you will learn the importance of sharing poetry with children and discover techniques for effectively promoting poetry. You will exchange ideas for creating thematic units with poetry, for writing poetry, for choral readings using sound effects, and for combining drama with poetry. You will also explore how to liven up your library with poetry bulletin boards, displays, and contests. The latest and greatest poetry books for children will be examined.

Database Design and Applications I: Introduction to Database Systems
Sign up for this workshop to learn the concepts of database systems and to gain a working knowledge of designing and building a simple database system with Microsoft Access. Workshop topics include database systems and models, maintaining a database, querying a database, and creating forms and reports. Some familiarity with Windows =95 and Microsoft Office applications is required.

Database Design and Applications II: Issues, Principles and Intermediate Skills
This workshop begins where Database Design I left off, giving participants a good understanding of database design principles and the intermediate skills needed to build a database system in practice. By workshop's end, you'll know how to use Microsoft Access to build an enhanced database system integrated with other applications, such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Web browsers that supports advanced queries, forms, and reports.

Database-Driven Web Sites
Creating database-driven Web sites is a common practice to manage and publish data for sophisticated and complex Web sites. This workshop will be helpful to library and information science students, librarians, information specialists, and anyone interested in understanding database-driven Web sites. Students will study applications that can produce database-driven Web sites, including both commercial and open source tools, and will learn possible avenues to create such Web sites. In addition, students will get hands-on experience in creating dynamic database-driven Web sites using various approaches. Knowledge and skills in relational databases and HTML.  Participants should have some familiarity with Microsoft Windows and Access.

Designing Successful Grant Projects
Participants will discuss various grant projects utilized by librarians to serve library patrons and the community, reviewing projects in the areas of literacy, older readers, services to people with disabilities, and other areas. Students will be introduced to the major components of grant writing and will learn how project ideas result in a successfully-funded proposal. As a result of this workshop, students will have increased knowledge, skill, and experience in developing grant projects that will bring in new funds for their library.

Digital Imaging I: Image Processing
This workshop introduces students to the fundamental concepts, terminology, techniques and applications of digital imaging as they relate to the development of digital image collections depicting works found in museum collections, archives, and special collections in libraries. Students will acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to create, process, and manage digital images of text, graphics, slides, and reproductions of 3-D objects. This workshop focuses on individual images.

Electronic Publishing I: Intro to SGML/HTML
In this workshop, students will gain an understanding of the basic architecture of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) and HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). With this knowledge, students will be able to design, construct, and launch a basic Web site with internal and external links, graphics, tables, image maps, and navigational controls.

Electronic Publishing II: Advanced HTML and Early JavaScript
Students in this workshop will obtain an advanced knowledge of HTML and a basic knowledge of JavaScript and CGI, designing Web sites that integrate these elements. Specifically, students will be able to insert functional forms, scrolling messages, rolling banners, on-mouseovers, and pop-up windows into their Web sites.

Electronic Reference Start-Up
Learn about the conceptual and practical aspects of electronic reference services, including OhioLINK, OPLIN (Ohio Public Library Information Network), and IPL (Internet Public Library). You will become familiar with recent developments, current practices, challenges, and opportunities associated with these services, such as learning to adjust traditional reference techniques to the electronic environment and designing, implementing, and evaluating an electronic reference service.

Ethical Priniciples and Cases for Information Professionals
This workshop introduces ethical concerns of library and information professionals, considering ethical principles and how they might conflict, organizational and professional loyalties, codes of ethics, and how a type of library affects ethical deliberations. Issues to be analyzed include intellectual freedom, the fee vs. free controversy, copyright, privacy, ethical issues surrounding the internet and reference services, and censorship issues in public libraries.

Evaluation of Internet Tools and Resources
Enroll in this workshop to learn basic principles for the evaluation of tools and resources on the Internet. In particular, you will assess the merits and deficiencies of Internet tools and resources by developing an evaluation instrument checklist and then applying it to Internet Web pages, search engines, metasearch engines, and subject directories. Experience with Web browsers and search engines is helpful but not required.

Finding and Using Internet Tools and Resources
Develop an overview of major resources on the Internet and the tools for discovering, using, and organizing such resources, including search engines, meta-searchers, and subject directories. In this hands-on workshop, you will become adept at searching the Web with greater effectiveness, learning to access, use, and organize Internet resources and tools for professional work and research projects.

Genealogy and Local History Research Methods for Librarians
During this workshop, learn how to interpret questions and find appropriate sources in order to guide genealogists, local historians, and other researchers to the next source. Workshop participants will become familiar with census records, government documents, local history resources, online resources for genealogy, and a variety of public records found in court houses, including birth, death, marriage, and divorce records.

Internet Sources for Company, Industry, and Competitive Business Information

Workshop will cover the wide area of business information on the World Wide Web, including both free sources and subscription-based.  It will cover both search and evaluation techniques.  Sources include Lexis/Nexis, Factiva, Ebsco and other periodicals sources, the SEC and government statistical sites, Standard & Poor’s, industry associations, corporate sites, and university portals.  Although no experience with business or finance is required as required, the workshop will cover basic business concepts that are necessary to increase understanding and confidence with the information.

Introduction to Map Librarianship
Serving as an introduction to map librarianship, this workshop teaches students how maps and cartographic materials are arranged, how to perform reference services for these materials, and how to meet the changing needs of users. The workshop focuses on using print cartographic materials as well as supporting digital mapping needs.

Is That a Fact? Nonfiction Children's Literature
With the virtual explosion in the quality and quantity of nonfiction children's titles in the last decade, there is a crucial need for librarians and educators to apply selection criteria and utilize reviewing tools in their evaluation of these materials. Take this workshop to hear suggestions for incorporating nonfiction into children's programming, utilizing nonfiction techniques. You'll be expected to compile a bibliography related to the topic prior to the start of the workshop.

JavaScript for Web Page Development (2 cr.)
Participants of this workshop will gain a working knowledge of JavaScript so they can implement design features of Web pages, making them dynamic and interactive. This workshop will also teach students the tools to find and use JavaScript resources on the Internet. Some previous experience with HTML and Web browsers is useful.

Legal Resources for Non-law Librarians
In this workshop, students will become aware of the structure of legal literature and learn to use legal indexes and sources for both case and statutory law. In addition, students will become familiar with the major success of American legal literature, furthering their awareness of the principles, issues, and practices in law librarianship. Finally, the rules of proper legal citation will be introduced.

Lexis / Nexis Searching
Students will develop an understanding of basic and advanced approaches to searches of NEXIS databases and an overview of their variety and applications. Upon completion, students will have developed skills in online bibliographic searching through hands-on experience with LEXIS / NEXIS, using both beginning and advanced techniques. This is a hands-on workshop that includes many out-of-class assignments.

Library Programming for Families with Very Young Children
Participants in this workshop will be introduced to the important role family members can play in the emerging literacy skills of young children. Library programs for the entire family will be discussed, including family history, multicultural, and intergenerational programs as well as family storytime programs and storytelling techniques. In addition, participants will learn to relate the developmental characteristic of young children to program planning and book sharing and will learn to plan literature-based family programs and methods of outreach to families of special populations.

Making Teamwork Work
This workshop will introduce the concepts and practices of group dynamics, teamwork processes, team development, and team function. Illustrations and exercises will emphasize the library setting. Workshop participants will learn to identify and describe the characteristics of teams; understand the basic process of teamwork; understand issues faced by teams such as conflict, power, leadership, and problem solving; structure team meetings for optimal effectiveness; facilitate teams using effective communication skills and motivational techniques.

Marketing and Merchandising Library Services to Children and Young Adults
Develop a philosophy for effectively marketing and merchandising library services to teens and children. You'll learn to identify the basic tenets and components of public library service for children and young adults and to identify problems that librarians face when marketing services to youth. In addition, this workshop will provide you with information about methods of library layout and design that appeal to children and young adult library users, and you will develop your own marketing plan for children and/or young adult services.

Marketing to the Masses: Practical Planning and Execution for Libraries and Information Centers
This workshop introduces participants to the field of marketing and to core business concepts. After completing the workshop, students will be able to set a mission, vision, strategy, goals, and objectives for a public library or information center. In addition, they will have learned marketing rules, tools, and practices and will have discovered and shared marketing and merchandising techniques. Day one of the workshop focuses on strategic planning / marketing by design, and day two focuses on marketing / data-driven communications. All enrolled students will design a post-workshop marketing plan.

Marketing your School Library in Tough Budgeting Times

This workshop is designed to help school librarians prepare and implement a communications plan that will market the library’s resources and its services and advocate for a budget.  You will gain an understanding of the basic marketing techniques for a school library media program and will develop skills in planning and evaluating using library reports for marketing.

Metadata for Digital Collections
This is the perfect workshop for anyone who wants to learn to establish digital collections in distinct information communities for the purposes of managing, publishing, and preserving documents in the digital environment. Emphasis will be on the development and implementation of metadata schemas and on the standards and technological applications used to create machine understandable metadata. Among other skills, workshop participants will gain experience in applying a selected metadata standard to records or collections and will learn to design, evaluate, and modify metadata elements according to local need. Finally, participants will be able to contribute to the implementation of metadata in a Web site or database.

Ohio Children's Literature
Sign up for this workshop and recognize the importance of local history, becoming familiar with Ohio children's literature, Ohio children's authors, and related nonfiction materials. Participants will learn about Ohio history, geography, and science materials and will be able to use this knowledge to enhance their teaching of Ohio. Participants will also leave the workshop ready to incorporate children's Ohio materials in classroom and library settings.

Online Searching of NEXIS Databases
The workshop introduces students to searching Nexis databases of the information provider Lexis-Nexis and will include many hands-on exercises as well as lectures on basic and advanced searching techniques. Other areas to be covered include the development of search strategies, the merits of natural and controlled vocabulary searching, the variety of resources provided by Lexis-Nexis, and the evaluation of search results.

Open Source Software for Libraries

More and more libraries are beginning to embrace open source, utilizing open source software for a range of needs, from general (such as operating systems) to more specific library tasks (ranging from very small utility software for MARC data format conversions to major applications like Integrated Library Systems [ILS]). This workshop covers topics related to open source for libraries that attendees may apply in order to identify, evaluate, and implement open source in libraries.

PHP and MySQL for Web Database Creation and Implementation
Take this workshop and gain a basic understanding of PHP (Personal Home Page Tools, a server-side scripting language) and MySQL (a powerful database system that is used for storage and retrieval of information residing on a server but accessed through a Web interface). You will learn to build and configure PHP as a server module and implement a MySQL database with which a Web interface will interact.

*Participants must have familiarity with HTML, programming, database theory and browsers.

Picture Book Webs: Extending Picture Books with Drama, Language Arts, Music, Art, Math, Science and Writing
Attend this workshop to learn ways for sharing picture books with children in preschool through third grade. You will discover how to enhance literature throughout the curriculum using drama, language arts, music, math, science and writing. You will also gain motivation to use more picture books and literacy activities with children in public and school libraries while increasing young children's emergent literacy activities.

Planning for Building and Renovating Public Library Spaces: If You Want to Build It… How to Plan So They Will Come
Students will learn the basics of planning for building library space and will examine how to evaluate existing space, determine future needs, and plan for furnishings and equipment. The next step will be to create a “program” for the architects of a library building based on the evaluation of the library's future needs. Students will achieve an awareness of how to involve staff, the public, and the marketing department to create a successful project. Finally, students will also explore planning for any move(s) related to their project.

Preservation of Library Materials
Various aspects of preservation will be covered in this workshop, including care and handling of general collections, disaster response and prevention, repair decisions as related to collection development and reformatting of brittle materials. You will gain a more complete understanding of the factors that influence the life span of print and non-print materials and will also develop skills to make repair decisions, respond to disasters, and plan for water and fire damage.

Public Library Web Resources
This workshop familiarizes participants with the selection, collection, organization, and maintenance of Web resource collections in the public library environment. Students examine collection development policies, emphasizing and differences among those for print and Web materials. Students also consider issues of resource transience, granularity, description and producers of Web resources, as well as standards for their evaluation and techniques for managing and maintaining such collections.

Readers' Advisory Services to Adults
The purpose of this workshop is to introduce participants to the genres of fiction and to readers' advisory print and electronic tools. Students will become acquainted with the history, current practices, and issues in readers' advisory services and will learn the necessary skills and strategies to keep current in this quickly-changing field. Among other activities, workshop enrollees will participate in a book discussion, write a book review, present a booktalk, and prepare a reading plan.

Reference Sources for Children Update

You will get an informative overview of new print and non-print reference resources and hear suggestions for using these resources as bibliographic instruction tools.  You will evaluate reference sources in terms of their authority, scope, treatment, arrangement, format, and special features.  You will also identify reference guides to print and non-print materials of particular relevance to instructional media centers and public libraries and identify, select, and evaluate informational books, video and CD-ROMs as appropriate sources for young people. 

Repair Decisions and Methods for Circulating Materials
The goal of this workshop is to teach repair methods that are less damaging to books, leading to preservation-oriented, archival-quality collection maintenance. Participants will learn to determine the appropriate methods for preserving books, repairing torn pages, tipping in loose pages, tightening hinges, reattaching broken hinges, repairing simple spine damage, re-casing books, binding pamphlets, and making simple phase boxes.

Separating Content and Presentation: Designing Web Sites with XHTML and CSS
This workshop centers on the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) as the basis for formatting Web-based documents. Students will gain mastery over using style sheets to position objects on Web pages without the use of tables, to control typography without any formatting elements on the Web page itself, and to produce aesthetically engaging pages without changing the structural markup of the pages. Such Web sites will be compliant with federal regulations regarding accessibility (Section 508 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act), and with validation according to strict XHTML guidelines specified W3C.

* Participants must know how to author an HTML document and must be familiar with a Windows environment

Sports Reference:  Sources for Sports Information

Students will gain insight into the breadth of the topic of sports and society as well as awareness of potential sources they can use to assist patrons. People who study an aspect of sports, or who simply are interested as fans or participants, will have opportunity to acquire new information tools with which to broaden their understanding of sport.  By the end of the workshop, students should be able to understand the structure of sports information sources, both print and electronic, and answer a wide variety of sports-related reference questions.

Telling Tales: Sharing Folk and Fairy Tales with Children
Take this workshop and receive an overview of the origin and history of different types of folktales, paying particular attention to recurring themes and motifs. You will hear about folktales from around the world as well as American tall tales, fables, modern fairy tales, and award-winning tales. You'll also learn creative ways to extend folk and fairy-tales, including story sharing, poetry, music, dramatics, reader's theatre, puppetry, and rap.

Thinking Outside the Book: Non-Book Materials for Teens in Libraries
This workshop will introduce participants to popular, current titles of non-book media targeted at young adults. Items such as magazines, graphic novels, comic books, music, audiobooks, movies, software, and Web sites will be examined and discussed. Participants will be able to identify current trends and titles and integrate this type of media into their plan of service.

Toys in a Library? Toys, Play, and the Literacy Connection
A ball, a baby's rattle, a puzzle: what do these items have to do with learning to read and write? Participants will examine how play and toys have a vital role in the development of reading and writing skills for all young children, including those with disabilities. In addition, participants will identify current uses of toys in Ohio library settings and examine ways to collaborate and access existing community resources involving play and young children.

UNIX and Linux Operating Systems
This workshop examines theoretical concepts common to both operating systems while providing a hands-on approach to these systems. In addition to examining the UNIX file structure, this workshop will explore application design and programming using UNIX. After completing the workshop, participants will have a working knowledge of UNIX and Linux and will be able to do the following: set up a homepage in a UNIX environment such as kent.mail, understand more than 50 of the most frequently-used UNIX commands, describe Linux as it relates to UNIX, define operating systems in general and the UNIX operating system in particular, develop customized shell scripts to extract and combine file data.

Usability Testing for the Web
Introduction to the concepts and practice of human-computer interaction and usability testing for the web. Become familiar with principles, methods, and tools relating to usability testing. Gain experience implementing usability testing techniques and procedures.

Using Web 2.0 Principles to Become Librarian 2.0

Students will discover how libraries are using Web 2.0 tools, such as blogs, RSS feeds, wikis, social communities, podcasts, and various “mash-ups”, to give library users increased ownership in their library interactions. Students will investigate the major principles and applications, while developing an understanding of the library-specific issues. Topics of discussion may include privacy, trust or abuse of these technologies, policy considerations, factors to implementation, and optimization in the library environment.

Using JavaScript to Jazz up Web Pages (1 cr.)
Participants of this hands-on workshop will gain a working knowledge of JavaScript so that they can implement design features of Web pages, making them dynamic and interactive. This workshop will also teach students the tools to find and use JavaScript resources on the Internet. Some previous experience with HTML and computer programming is useful but not required.

Web-based Electronic Publishing II: Advanced HTML
Building on the concepts learned in Electronic Publishing I, this workshop introduces an advanced set of HTML elements and gives participants a chance to use these elements in constructing tables, frames, forms, and imagemap files. Participants will create functional Web sites using HTML 4 and Cascading Style Sheets. At the conclusion of this workshop, participants will be able to create higher-level Web documents and will be aware of the applications of Web programming languages. (Day 1 will be in a classroom; the remainder of the workshop will be completed on students' own time.)

XML for Web Site Content Management (2 cr.)
XML is a markup language designed specifically for storing and delivering information over the Web, noted for its ease of implementation and for its interoperability with both SGML and HTML. This workshop will introduce students to basic XML concepts, focusing on their merits and limitations in content management. Workshop participants will learn to apply the syntax and semantics of generic XML schemas to practical Web site management tasks.

Young Adult Best Bets: A Young Adult Literature Update- 2007-2008
During this workshop, you will become familiar with current young adult books and the qualities that make an award-winning "best" book. You will learn to identify young adult literature trends and titles and market books in a manner that appeals to young adults by utilizing reader=s advisory services, book talks, and promotional activities. You will also discuss how to review and annotate a book.

Young Adult Literature Past and Present

Students in this workshop will gain a foundation of important works and trends in Young Adult Literature and will become acquainted with true and modern classics in young adult literature, learn about significant authors and their works, and discuss common themes that prevail throughout young adult Literature,  In addition, students will discuss techniques and means for collection development for  young adults and practice ways of promoting Young Adult literature to teens.

A more general catalog of workshops can be found at: the College of Continuing Studies website at http://www.kent.edu/ContinuingStudies.