Communications & Technology – Law Librarians of New England

Tech Committee Update – All About Jotform

So you’ve been dying to learn all about how we create the forms we use for events and things like that. Or maybe you’re not, but I’m going to tell you anyway. And it would help to have some instructions somewhere.

Say there’s a meeting coming up and we need a form stat! Fortunately, I don’t need to create a whole new form. I can copy a form from an earlier meeting and reuse the content. We use Jotform for our meeting registrations, and that’s pretty easy to use.

Screenshot of Jotform website, showing the orange "Create Form" button in the left-hand navigation, and a list of forms to the right. — Getting started with the form

To make the changes, I’ll need the following info from the event organizers:

Name of meeting
Co-sponsor
Price
Questions for attendees (lunch, dine-arounds, etc.)

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Hello and Welcome from the New LLNE President!

Good morning!

As the new LLNE president I wanted to take a moment and welcome everyone to this new membership year. In many ways, this year seems dishearteningly similar to last year, with all the uncertainty, anxiety, and apprehension about how the pandemic might affect our personal and professional lives. Our immediate past president, Nicole Dyszlewski, along with LLNE volunteers on and off the Executive Board, dedicated enormous quantities of time and energy to provide opportunities for us to continue to learn, engage with each other, and enjoy each other’s company — even without the luxury of face-to-face gatherings. Special thanks to all of you as well as to the following outgoing members of the Executive Board:

Bob de Fabrizio, outgoing past president, Manager of Law Libraries, MA Trial Courts
Ellen Frenzen, outgoing co-chair of the Communications Committee, Assistant Dean for Administration at Boston University Law School
Anne McDonald, outgoing co-chair of the Government Relations Committee, Law Library Coordinator, Rhode Island Dept. of the Attorney General
AnnaKatherine Wherren: outgoing chair of Scholarships Committee, Legal Research Librarian, Suffolk University Law School

I’d also like to welcome the incoming board members:

Catherine Biondo, co-chair of the Government Relations Committee, Research Librarian, Harvard Law Library
Kaitlin Connolly, co-chair of the Service Committee, Reference Librarian, State Library of Massachusetts
Josh LaPorte, vice president, president-elect, Head of Access Services, Boston University Law Library
Anne Rajotte, chair of the Access to Justice Committee, Head of Reference Services, University of Connecticut Law Library
Dawn Smith, chair of the Scholarships Committee, Head of Acquisitions, Yale Law School

LLNE means different things to each of us. For the 2012 version of me, membership simply meant seasonal meetings and the potential for engaging more with the LLNE community – once my infant and toddler daughters got a little older. In 2021, it means working with and learning from a group of awesome people from across New England. It’s also meant drawing cartoon llamas with other LLNE families and getting a glimpse of what executive board members’ canine companions think of them. Whatever this year brings, I hope we are able to find ways to continue to connect with each other.

Take care.

Mike

A Day in the Life of a LLNE.org co-webmaster (Technology Committee)

Morning:

I log into my work email for the first time today and am greeted by several emails from familiar LLNE names. With an ever expanding subject line that includes as least 4 “RE: [EXT]s,” my eyes scan the email in the hopes of seeing a resolution from my co-webmaster. Absent any such resolution, I start from the beginning and identify that this is not a crisis email like the ones that we’ve gotten for our hacked website or after I broke the website while trying to update plugins. This time, it’s just a request to help build a form for facilitating registration and payment for the upcoming Legal Research Instruction Program. Since I have a busy morning reference shift ahead of me, I email the concerned parties that we will work on this request later in the day.

In the meantime, I email my co-webmaster to see if he is able to address this today. He’s too busy with real job duties, so I offer to take this one.

Afternoon:

After reviewing the specific needs of the registration form, I log into Jotform to see if I can recycle a similar form that we’ve used in the past. Luckily, the previous form is still there. I duplicate the old version, tweak some dates, and give it a test drive. Once it passes the test drive, I email the co-webmaster to check my work. Since he created the original form, I want to make sure that the form will link with Paypal correctly. After a brief Zoom meeting, I respond to the original email thread with a direct link to the form. Proud of myself for finishing this task without breaking a sweat, I close my work laptop for the day.

Night:

The latest episode of WandaVision just wrapped up and I check at my work email, hoping to get a jumpstart on weeding out spam email before my busy morning tomorrow. The unusual amount of new “RE: [EXT]” subject lines is alarming. With a swift touch of a button, my work laptop fires up. It appears that I prematurely patted myself on the back for a job well done this afternoon. While I had correctly created a new registration form, the old form was still linked online and causing confusion. I quickly reassure the interested parties, deactivate the old form, and send out the current link again.

Another bullet dodged on LLNE.org.

By: Alex Burnett

Technology Committee Update

The LLNE Technology Committee continues to maintain and develop the LLNE.org website, support the LLNE and Executive Board listservs, and implement and maintain automated membership tools. Specifically, over the last couple of years, Artie and Alex have implemented Memberpress, which is an automated membership tracking and payment tool, improved search engine optimization so that LLNE.org shows up higher in search engine result, and brought the website back online after a serious hack. We also reviewed several options and selected a new listserv platform, Mail-List, after AALL’s listserv became unfeasible as well as reviewing several video platforms and selecting Vimeo for LLNE’s hosted videos.

After the website was hacked, Artie and Alex took several steps to increase security, including changing a plethora of passwords, purging unused website plugins and updating out of date ones, and ensuring continuous backups of the entire site.

We work with many of the other LLNE committees to support their goals and Artie and Alex are always happy to help with anything relating to the website or listserv. Help can include training committee members on using the WordPress system, updating web pages on their behalf, or aiding them in finding technological solutions, such as Memberpress.

LLNE Communications Committee Report (October 2020)

Your committee co-chairs, Sara and Ellen have been busy planning a full slate of content for this upcoming year. We’ve had so much fun seeing everyone’s pets in our Zoom meetings we decided to launch a new blog post series introducing members of the Executive Board through interviews with their pets. You can also look forward to regularly scheduled blog updates from committees, a new Facebook page, and a few fun virtual social events. We also want to hear from YOU, our members! We welcome suggestions for new or improved communication channels, feedback on your communication likes and dislikes, and committee volunteers to work on special projects!

LLNE Technology Committee Report (October 2020)

The technology committee continues to maintain the website and listserv. Recent activities include, reverting website to previous version when updating a plug-in caused a crash, working with membership committee & treasurer to get memberships renewed, llne.org accounts updated, & mail-list updated.

LLNE Blog/Social Media Editor opening

Blog/Social Media Editor

Interested in getting to know your fellow LLNE members and develop your editorial and technical skills? The LLNE Communications Committee is looking for an energetic LLNE member (or prospective member!) to oversee our communications channels including our blog and social media. We’re totally open to working with you to mold this into an position that will be personally satisfying and rewarding for you while helping LLNE to grow and find new ways to share information with our members. Responsibilities include:

• Collaborate with LLNE officers and committees to share news with LLNE members by posting to LLNE’s blog, and social media accounts
• Develop content and share info about LLNE and other law librarianship nuggets that our members will find helpful
• Help create a strategic plan for information sharing

TheMarketingheaven.com’s subscribers is what one can go for to reach more people and market better.

If you’re interested or have any questions at all, please email current LLNE Communications and Technology Committee co-chairs: Michelle Pearse: mpearse@law.harvard.edu and Diane D’Angelo: ddangelo@suffolk.edu

Law and Technology: Canva

By Carli Spina

No matter what your exact job title is, you probably find yourself working on design projects from time-to-time. Whether you are creating posters for an upcoming event, adding content to your library’s website or blog, or creating internal documentation for processes and workflows, graphic design is a feature of a huge array of different library projects. While a client’s job gets done with a Graphic Design Service Subscription, a designer has a series of works to do. If you work on these sorts of projects every day, you probably have your favorite (and likely expensive) graphic design software installed on your computer. But, if you only work on these sorts of projects occasionally, you may find the steep costs and learning curves of this software daunting. Canva is a great tool for anyone in this situation. This web-based graphic design tool is free and quite easy to use and offers you the option to keep costs down by finding your own media to add to your project or to use premium Canva images and templates for a reasonable cost (usually $1 per item).

When you first log onto Canva, you are given the option to create a design either based on your own custom dimensions or by using one of the available project types. These run the gamut from the dimensions needed for common types of social media posts to the dimensions needed to create slides for a presentation, so you will frequently find an option that meets your needs. Even if you don’t find the size you need, you can easily specify your own dimensions.

Once you select your dimensions, your new project will automatically open and prompt you to select a layout. You can instead opt to create your own custom layout, but it is nice to have the option to use one of the included layouts as a starting point. Though not all of the available layouts are free, any that are not free are marked, as is true of all premium content in Canva. One of the nicest features offered by Canva is its integrated image search. This tool allows you to search for images from within Canva when you need them for your project. Some of the images that are returned will be premium images (most, if not all, of which cost $1 each), but generally you will also find free images this way. If you can’t find the right image for your project, you can also upload your own images, which allows you to maintain complete control over the final product. Canva also offers a number of fonts and logos that can help to give your project a professionally designed appearance.

Canva3

Your project will automatically save as you work on it. Drafts or completed projects can be shared using the unique URL given to each project and you can specify whether you want the shared project to be editable or not. By default, only you are able to edit the project. Canva also has an integrated option to share projects directly to Facebook, Twitter, or email if you want to solicit feedback on your design. You can also download your project as a PDF or PNG file, at which point you will be asked to pay for any of the premium content that you used.

If you are new to graphic design (or have patrons who are), Canva also offers a number of resources to help you get started. Canva users can opt to make their projects public and those projects all end up in the “Design Stream,” which is part gallery and part social network. This can be a great place to look to see what others have done with the tool and to get inspiration. Canva also offers tutorials that are designed to walk even someone who has no design experience through many of the basic principles of graphic design. If you are interested in offering classes to teach your patrons about graphic design, Canva also offers lesson plans that make it easy to integrate Canva into this type of programming. All of this content is free, which makes it a great perk for Canva users. I’ve been using Canva off and on for months and I think it is a great tool for library design projects.