Last day at CTC2009

This morning’s plenary session, Be Prepared: Ensuring the Continuity of Court Operations During an Emergency, began with a description of the effect of the flood in Cedar Rapids, Iowa had on the courts.  They learned it is best to plan before a disaster hits rather than during.  The panelists each discussed important elements of a plan including the special considerations that must be made for pandemics.  I would recommend viewing this on the NCSC website if only for the video about the Iowa flood.

The use of A2J, HotDocs, and online chat were the technologies discussed in the program Technology that Enables Self Help Centers: Solutions to Increasing Demands in a Time of Austerity.  The presentation of this program was unique as the presentation utilized A2J as a learning tool.  This program was reassuring in that public law libraries were listed as one of the locations where the New York DIY forms can be accessed and that LiveHelp web chat was based on the California Law Libraries AskNow Live Chat service.  The Live Chat was illustrated with a picture of the Sacramento Public Law Library webpage.  Good answers to that question: “why have a law library?”  This program will be available on the NCSC website soon.

Online access to CTC2009 video streams mentioned above at the NCSC website: http://www.icmelearning.com/ctc/ (Registration is required.)

After lunch in the exhibit hall as I was trying to decide on the next program to attend I noticed that the sun was shining and decided to just go outside.  I could see the mountains, some with snow.  It is a really beautiful city.  I rode the 16th Street hybrid bus to the park along the river and stopped in the Tattered Cover bookstore.  On my return bus ride I ran into Madeline from the 10th Circuit Library.  It was fun to see someone I knew especially since I had been disappointed that I had no time to try and visit Denver law libraries while I was here.

I did return for a final program.  Simple (and  Cheap) Tips for Making Your Web Site User Friendly listed some basic principles of design:  think like your audience, people don’t read but scan and following convention is a good idea.  Conventions for web pages include logos go in the top left corner, search boxes in the right and important information goes above the scroll line.  Some of the tips for design were the “rule of seven” limiting the number of navigation buttons, having a header that shows for the information below the scroll line and use of bread crumb navigation.  The session ended with critiques of volunteer websites.

The speaker, Susan Finkelpearl of Free Range Studios, gave us this ink to more tips in their Technology White Papers: freerangestudios.com/resources

The slides from this program and all of the CTC programs will soon be available on the NCSC website.  You can find a future link on the CTC blog: http://pluginpowerup.org/ to the CTC conference site