At the recent ARLIS/NA conference in Boston, I presented a poster session titled Using Emerging Technologies for Target Marketing Art & Design Reference and Instruction. My poster covered how emerging technologies including blogs, wikis, photo editing applications, and web based chat applications can be used to create different types of information and communication platforms to target market my art & design instruction, reference, and research services to Art & Design faculty and students as the Art Librarian at Texas State University – San Marcos. Using these emerging technologies, I created different tools to promote my services including flyers, my blog called Art & Design Inforama at http://artinforama.blogspot.com/, library instruction class outlines, a personal chat widget for answering art research questions, and embedded library instruction class outline web pages in faculty’s class course management sites. Some of the applications and social networking tools that I use are free or open source.

As part of the instruction librarian team, I use an open source wiki tool powered by MediaWiki to create the class outlines that I use on the projection screen when I teach the instruction sessions. The wiki allows for fast and easy editing of the content to customize our class outlines to the instructor’s class or assignment. I can then take this wiki content and add it to, or we call “embed,” it in the instructor’s course management site, or what our institution calls TRACS site, for the class, if the instructor wishes. This allows students to access the class outline with all of its information and links after the class throughout the rest of the semester. I also “embed” a web based chat widget into their TRACS site which gives the students or instructor a live, direct way to contact me with library or research related questions. This widget is also embedded on the Art & Design Research Guide that I maintain on the library’s website.

I had a well attended poster session. Several attendees had questions and discussions that covered topics including copyright, technical issues, and both open source and fee based applications. I enjoyed the informal poster session format, and especially how it seemed to encourage questions and discussions with colleagues.

--Tara Spies, Reference/Instruction Librarian and Art Librarian, Texas State University – San Marcos