Brick & Click Library Symposium, November 3 2006

Several of us attended this conference. Here are our impressions, listed by session in no particular order.

Training Made Fun - Stephanie Atkins, UI Urbana-Champaign

This was one of Rachel's favorite sessions. I liked it because Ms Atkins presented the why, the what and the how of her online training modules, along with comments about the situations when this method is not the most appropriate training technique. I'll try to recapitulate the main points here:

• why Having some training occur online helps ensure that across the rapidly turning-over "generations" of undergraduate student workers, training is consistent from student to student and trainer to trainer. The type of training used includes a significant interactive component in the form of several types of quizzes and a Jeopardy-like team quiz game; increased interactivity aids learning, especially for Millennial students. Allowing students to "go sit in a corner" with a computer and go through the programs frees up staff time for training on the more complex tasks, exceptions, troubleshooting etc.

• what A series of six videos (screenshots without sound but with some screen magnification and callouts) on topics like Catalog Basics, Patron Records, Item Records, Discharging, and Placing Requests. A corresponding series of quizzes, including one cumulative quiz in the form of a Jeopardy-like quiz game.

• how Training videos created using Camtasia; Quizzes created using Respondus StudyMate software.

• when/when not Online training is extremely useful for "boring basics" such as how to fill out a time sheet, basics of the ordinary student-worker workflow, and the like. What is should NOT be used for are service behaviors, which are probably still best taught with role-play and other face-to-face techniques, and complex tasks requiring judgment, troubleshooting and/or exceptional situations, which should be covered in discussion or in some reference/as-needed format such as a wiki or printed manual.

Relevance to MU Libraries: We already have Camtasia. MU, through ET@MO, has a Respondus license - as long as this license also includes StudyMate, I see little to stop us, technically speaking, from considering things like this. For that matter, if we become adept at creating quizzes, that can also be part of our research tool online training. Some of the quizzes did in fact look "fun," particularly the Jeopardy-style quiz game.

Take the Library With You on the Web: A Mozilla Firefox Toolbar

PowerPoint available at http://library.uncg.edu/de/bandc2006.ppt

Having a toolbar in your Firefox browser, that could let you search your library catalog or go to key library resources, no matter where on the web you are, would be...well...SO COOL. The fact that some other libraries have created these and programmers have written handy little tutorials on writing toolbars means programmers no longer need start totally from scratch, but they do still have to know a bit of Java. A few key links, taken from the PowerPoint:

Fast Jack: http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/library/toolbar/index.html

Appalachian State Law School: http://www.asl.edu/library/halbar

LibX: http://www.libx.org

Firefox Toolbar Tutorial: http://www.borngeek.com/firefox/tutorial