This session consisted of three different presentations. There were many good ideas and I got a few good points out of each of the presentations.
Cynthia Orozco and Jamie Hazlitt of Loyola Marymount University presented a talk titled "Instalibrary : Make it Visual." They described how their typical users (college students) prefer minimal text and lots of graphics. Consequently using graphics in an effective way can be one of the best ways to communicate. They then provided many examples of using graphics (sometimes even things like pictures of text) as effective ways to reach out to their users. They also suggested searching sources like Flickr and YouTube for photos and videos that users have made of your institution and using them in a variety of contexts. That seems something that could possibly encounter legal difficulties, but it certainly has potential.
Brian Smith from Reaching Across Illinois Library System (RAILS) described the process and benefits in having images rescaled/resized
on the fly (FlexSlider and Mobile Detect are some ways to deal with
the problem). There are many themes for Drupal that can help such as the theme "AdaptiveTheme" and the sites ThemeBrain and SooperThemes can be good sources for responsive designs. Buying a good
theme can be a smart approach rather than getting a free theme and then spending a lot of time fixing it. There are some special techniques required
for retina displays for best image quality. If you can adopt a rescaling solution like this it is to your best advantage to upload the biggest size of image you can imagine using and then having all of the necessary scaling done on the fly for your site.
John Blyberg from Darien Library in Connecticut talked about about Twitter Bootstrap. It's an open-source collection of CSS, HTML &
javascript that makes rapid development of pages much easier. I have a set of problems where this solution would work extremely well and I look forward to taking advantage of it.
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