Karen Bowling (gen X) and Aubrey Durrant (gen Z) from the Smithfield Public Library will walk you through our history of social media at the library. From our initial struggles to our current successes, showing you how we leveled up our online presence and how it’s helped our library reach out to our community and beyond. We’ll offer practical design knowledge and strategic examples that can help you build on the social media you’re already doing. And we’ll give you ways to keep it cheap or free! Part I: Humble Beginnings - Resources for Getting Started Facebook and Instagram: using these platforms for success. Meta Business Suite: a visual tour for new users to organize their content. Canva: graphic design made simple. Part II: Level Up Your Look Slideshow/Tutorial: Graphic design basics for librarians. Solidifying your brand: making your library unique, recognizable, and appealing. Part III: Build a Community Follow, like, collaborate, tag, repost, comment. Show the behind-the-scenes of YOUR work - relate with your audience. Video/content examples from libraries we love. Part IV: Social Media Safety. Creating a social media policy to protect the library. Password safety. Watching for suspicious activity. Keeping posts and interactions relevant to your goals.
The Smithfield Public Library has been partnering with our city Arts Council since April 2024, when six (or seven) strangers met in a small conference room at City Hall. Our partnership has now resulted in two seasons of a summer concert series and an immersive Christmas Storybook Festival, as well as several other fun events, a bunch of new friendships, and a ton of high fives!
Learn how a handful of willing residents have built a thriving network of community volunteers who are interested in improving the quality of life in their city, with their once-neglected public library at the center. We’ll discuss how to organize public events on a shoestring budget using free online tools and how to cultivate new relationships with a wide range of arts communities. Our successes (and failures) will inspire you to walk out of the library and tap into the energy and expertise of your town as you create fun and exciting cultural events for your community.
Hello! I'm a director of a small-town library in Cache Valley, and I work with a staff of ten amazing people! Four of us are at ULA this year! In a previous life, I worked for the Utah State Library as a bookmobile librarian for 16 years. I loved it very much but I love being a director... Read More →
Wednesday May 20, 2026 1:15pm - 2:05pm MDT Soldier Creek
Utah State University (USU) Libraries has recently created a Metadata Application Profile (MAP) to successfully map and crosswalk metadata fields in DigitalCommons to DublinCore and DataCite. We created this MAP to help authors and librarians better understand our records in DigitalCommons; this MAP ensures consistency and readability with other Institutional Repositories. In this presentation, we will cover our process for creating a MAP, the relevant context for creating a MAP, and how we plan to implement this MAP to remediate metadata and increase accessibility of our materials.
The Marriott Library (University of Utah) has three media production studios as part of their ProtoSpace emerging technologies and digital scholarship hub. This presentation is part of an article under submission entitled User scheduled media production studios in academic libraries: A case study. This is a follow up article to my publication: Podcasting services in academic libraries: A case study. https://doi.org/10.1080/10691316.2021.1897722.
The Marriott Library has two Podcast Booths and a Simple Video Studio. Students, faculty, and staff can reserve these spaces for audio and video production. This presentation will discuss use statistics, the types of projects scheduled, and charts on how often and when each studio is in use.
While the purpose of each studio is media production, the data results show a variety of non-media projects taking place supporting coursework, teaching, outreach, research, and personal projects.
In addition to the use data, this talk will discuss suggestions for physical studio creation and affordable equipment lists. The purpose is to generate podcasts and film videos in any library type maker space location/environment.
Quality metadata is vital to the patron experience, but metadata creation is only one part of the metadata lifecyle. Patrons may not know what metadata maintenance, enhancement, and remediation are, but they do notice when they need to be done. In this panel, five librarians from BYU’s Cataloging and Metadata department will discuss the steps they have taken to upgrade the patron experience at their library through improved metadata. This panel will describe how to evaluate metadata, create and prioritize projects, involve student workers, and collaborate with other library departments to improve the patron's experience finding and using library materials
Katie Yeo is the 19th and 20th Century Americana Catalog Librarian at the Brigham Young University Library in Utah. She is also a former solo librarian at the Utah State Hospital Library. She is passionate about topics such as metadata accessibility and inclusive cataloging.
