Category: Libraries

This week there’s a yearly meme (can that possibly be the correct phrase?) about what librarians do all day. The idea is to show the many types of libraries and librarians out there, and presumably to educate and entertain. I’m not participating formally, as I usually tweet about projects I’m working on during the day as a quick way of networking with colleagues. I’m not great about exhaustively cataloging what I do in a day, as my never yet started “energy maps” and other day mapping activities indicate. I prefer to keep comprehensive to-do lists and calendars to make sure I’m doing what I intended to do. For the rest, I assume a little spontaneity is what keeps life fresh and interesting.

On the other hand, when it comes time to producing annual reports and so forth, quantifying the body of work not captured in calendars and project plans can be challenging. One of my current projects is to quantify effort in electronic resource management–this is what I will be addressing at two conferences this spring. For this I created a very simple trouble ticket system (you can download it here if you want) that we use to get problem reports from patrons so I can actually follow up with people. Before this, things would occasionally gather dust in inboxes until someone got around to clearing them out. Lots of libraries have ticketing systems, but this attempts to track how difficult a request was in addition to who answered and what the resolution was. The other point of such systems is to automatically populate a knowledgebase with answers to questions–this is definitely not that sophisticated a system, but the types of problems inform documentation and staff training. One thing that I hope to discern over the coming months is how difficultly levels are handled at different types of institutions to eventually develop a *spoiler alert* theoretical model for handing electronic resource issues. Basically it would fill out “routine product maintenance” in the Digital Library Federation’s Electronic Resource Management Workflow Diagram (find here in PDF).

Oh wait, but I was writing about the day in my library life. But right now I have to prep for instruction session, so that will have to wait.

In the lab…

I am trying another experiment to get participation in the library website redesign process. This time I have created a little survey in LibGuides to test three potential catalog search options. Here’s my voting box:

Library Labs in LibGuides

I created the Library Labs last semester for this kind of thing. I looked at many Library Labs pages before settling on LibGuides as the best option to create this.  The other options I considered were a WordPress blog and a page on regular library website. The library already has a WordPress.com blog that generally works well enough for our purposes, but as you may know you can’t change a whole lot for free on WordPress.com blogs. The tagging and template customization that would be necessary wouldn’t be possible for free. And why pay for a hosted blog when we already have scads of servers on campus plus two other candidate CMSs? Moving our blog to be self-hosted is on my to-do list for the future, but in the mean time I looked at both our CMS options. The CMS used for our regular website isn’t really meant to do all the things that were important to me in this project: namely, a very social and interactive feeling that would allow everyone to vote and comment. I am sure there are modules that could extend it to do so, but the only ones I found were very expensive, and anyway I don’t have any say over the administration of that CMS.  Since all that is built into LibGuides already, I went with that. My concern is that it doesn’t look as “official” as the regular website, but I suspect that might make people feel more comfortable contributing. I also find that LibGuides get to be terribly cluttered, so I have tried to stick to no more than two columns per page and minimize the boxes.

But does it work?

Statistics show that people do look at it, but I have to be very proactive in driving people to the page. You can see from the chart below that when it started in October some people viewed the page but didn’t view the website redesign tab. Then in November lots of people viewed it because I made updates and let people know about it. In December I pushed the Browser Toolbar tab, so people looked at that and not the website redesign page. Oddly enough, in January (not in the chart) the views are exactly even for each tab (there’s a new one for database trials).

“Library Labs” Page Hits 2010

Overall, I am happy with how this has gone so far. Not a lot of people have commented or submitted feedback, but I think that’s only to be expected– it’s still a relatively new feature, and getting anyone to fill out surveys or make comments except when they are annoyed about an already existing feature is difficult. I do count on the LIS students here to be the ones interested in participating, and I hope to do a lot more outreach with them in the future on this project.

I’ve had it up to here with articles like this. Toby (aka @theanalogdivide) suggested that someone make a Madlib of this type of article. With more time I am sure this could be better, but I think it gets that the basic idea.

_______________ (Insert city and state)– In the age of _______________ (technology catchphrase/social media trend), libraries must adapt to stay relevant. ______________ (old timey girl’s name) ______________ (Irish writer’s last name) is part of a movement of young librarians who think libraries should offer more _______________ (insert leisure activity) for their patrons. “Libraries should be more like ______________ (insert technology company name).”

________________(same Irish writer) is no stranger to novelty herself. Wearing ________________ (type of shoe) and sporting __________________ (a color) hair, she is more like a member of _________________ (outré 90s band) than the type of librarian you might remember growing up. “Libraries aren’t just places for ________________ (type of print media) anymore. Libraries also have ___________________ (type of business, plural) and online ________________ (genre of art).”

Will libraries survive once everything is online? “Yes,” says _______________ (same Irish writer), “but only if they update their images. If I as a young, attractive person can help do that, it will make my ______________________ (large number) dollars of student loans all worth it.”