After observing the technology knowledge gap between undergraduates and librarians at Brigham Young University’s Harold B. Lee Library created a self-directed training program for staff, offering incentives and methods for improving technology skills in a flexible manner.
From the article:
The Technology Challenge was implemented from June 2007 to January 2008. HBLL staff included 175 full-time employees, 96 of whom participated in the challenge. (The student employees were not involved.) Participants were asked to spend fifteen minutes each day learning a new technology skill. HBLL leaders used rewards to make the program enjoyable and to motivate participation: For each minute spent learning technology, participants earned one point, and when one thousand points were earned, the participant would receive a gift certificate to the campus bookstore. Staff and faculty participated and tracked their progress through an online board game called “Techopoly.”
Participation was voluntary, and staff and faculty were free to choose which tasks and challenges they would complete. Tasks fell into one of four categories: software, hardware, library technology, and the internet. Participants were required to complete one hundred points in each category, but beyond that, were able to decide how to spend their time. Examples of tasks included attending workshops, exploring online tutorials, and reading books or articles about a relevant topic. For each hundred points earned, participants could complete a mini-challenge, which included reading blogs or e-books, listening to podcasts, or creating a photo CD. Participants who completed fifteen out of twenty possible challenges were entered into a drawing for another gift certificate.
The full article is available through our databases:
Bridging the Gap: Self-Directed Staff Technology Training Quinney, Kayla L; Smith, Sara D; Galbraith, Quinn. Information Technology and Libraries29.4 (Dec 2010): 205-213.
For those of us interested in what’s happening at Code4Lib this year, they’ll be live streaming the conference events. The separate stream links are here.
As Libraries think about data curation, why don’t we start with our own data? This Code4Lib article from NCSU talks about how to plan and execute a data analysis project for helping to make decisions and share with stakeholders for various programs.
Some examples include:
Reference Transactions
QuickSearch (NCSU’s homegrown federated search)
Library Course Tools
Special collections usage
“Although there is undeniably a time-commitment involved in initiating this kind of effort, especially in cases where data-analysis and interdepartmental outreach are not part of one’s usual responsibilities, we think the short term and long term benefits are significant. At NCSU Libraries, a grassroots approach to data analysis with cooperation between technically-oriented librarians and departmental stakeholders has yielded positive short term results, helping a variety of departments to answer questions about how patrons use specific library applications and services. Developing strong collaborative partnerships between departments is both a challenge and a positive outcome of this approach. Longer term, we hope these efforts can increase awareness of good data collection practices and of the opportunities that exist to leverage data to answer questions that can help libraries improve applications and services, as well as foster a spirit of collaboration between library departments.”
http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/4258
MasterCard is planning to release an API in coming months, allowing certified developers to create applications that interact with MasterCard. PayPal is already paired up with Bump Technologies and allowing people to make payments to one another by bumping their iPhones together, and Visa with Visa payWave to just pass their card in front of a sensor to make payments.
Could this help libraries? We could make it easier for patrons to pay fines, or even make donations?
The Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has this pretty dashboard where they display the statistics that are relevant to their library. This includes database statistics, cataloging statistics, membership information, and so on.
Has anyone seen anything like this in use in an academic setting? It seems like a nice way to package some numbers about the kinds of things we do, and usage information.
[Thanks Kate!]
Our Text-a-Librarian service has just improved, significantly! We now have our own phone number, courtesy of Google Voice, where patrons can text us directly with questions. This is tied into Libraryh3lp, so any questions that are sent will go directly to Libraryh3lp where the person taking IM questions can also answer the text questions.
A couple of points:
To know whether someone is contacting us via text, look at the “from” in Pidgin. The greyed out section is the incoming phone number, and you’ll notice that it says “textalibrarian” and “voice” (meaning, Google Voice).
Both library queues will be getting the text questions, so if you see one come in, go ahead and claim it if you can answer it. Any questions that come in when no one is online will appear when the next person logs in.
Our new text number is 918-DREXEL1. Give it a try!
Last week’s issue of The Economist discussed the challenges of data, data management and the importance of relevancy and good metadata. There are several interesting articles, including one mentioning librarians as information managers.
The New Media Consortium’s 2010 Horizon Report features six technologies with a timeline for likely entrance into the mainstream for “teaching, learning or creative inquiry”. Each technology is accompanied by an overview, potential relevance for teaching, learning or creative inquiry, and examples of these technologies in use.
The web version of the full report is here.
In the next 12 months:
Mobile Computing and Open Content
In the next 2-3 years:
Electronic Books and Simple Augmented Reality
In 4-5 years:
Gesture-Based Computing and Visual Data Analysis
Marshall Breeding at Library Technology Guides has published Perceptions 2009: An International Survey of Library Automation. The survey asked about levels of satisfaction with various companies libraries use for their ILS, as well as information on open source products.
From librarytechnology.org:
Top survey findings
- Products and companies focusing on smaller libraries and narrower niches generally receive higher perception scores than those involved with larger, more complex organizations that and that serve multiple types of libraries.
- Apollo, a system adopted exclusively by small public libraries topped the charts in ILS, company, support perceived satisfaction and in company loyalty, following the formula for success mentioned above. Most libraries adopting Apollo have migrated from abandoned products such as Winnebago Spectrum and Athena.
- Libraries operating AGent Verso from Auto-Graphics and Polaris from Polaris Library Systems continue to receive extremely high scores, consistent with previous editions of this survey.
- Companies and products serving large and complex library organizations and diverse library types receive a broader range of responses, and fall into a middle tier of rankings. Yet where they fall within this middle ground represents important differences. Millennium from Innovative Interfaces, Library.Solution from The Library Corporation, and Evergreen as supported by Equinox Software came out as very strong performers at the top of this middle tier.
- Companies supporting proprietary ILS products receive generally higher satisfaction scores than companies involved with open source ILS. Evergreen, primarily supported by Equinox Software fell into the middle tier of satisfaction ratings. LibLime received especially poor marks in customer satisfaction; libraries implementing Koha independently gave themselves high ratings.
- Except for the libraries already using an open source ILS, the survey reflected low levels of interest, even when the company rates their satisfaction with their current proprietary ILS and its company as poor. Other than libraries already running an open source ILS, and for Winnebago Spectrum and Athena, the mode score from libraries using proprietary ILS products was 0. These results fail to confirm the trend of broad-based interest in open source ILS; rather we observe a minority of early adopters voicing strong support.
Yesterday I attended an EDUCAUSE webinar called “Library in your Pocket: Strategies and Techniques for Developing Successful Mobile Services.” Presented by the NCSU Libraries, it focused on services to patrons on mobile devices.
They have a few programmers who contributed time, and there was some discussion of the process they used to make a decision on which services they wanted to make available right away, and which of those can wait, or not b included at all.
The archive is available here.
