New Jersey Train the Trainer

About three weeks ago I was fortunate enough to attend a four-day Train the Trainer seminar in Eatontown, NJ. Although the program was designed with New Jersey librarians in mind, they were kind enough to open registration up to the surrounding areas. Alicia Hyre from Harford County Public Library was the only other Maryland library employee who attended--and like all of the other Maryland librarians I've met thus far, she's totally awesome and is doing great things for her library! I met several wonderful NJ librarians to whom my heart goes out during their current budget crisis. There were folks from public libraries, academic libraries, the State Library of NJ, special libraries; it was awesome!

The program was pretty intense. The first three days consisted of jam-packed schedules of 9AM-9PM classes with scheduled breaks and meals in between. We covered everything from adult learning principles, how to plan effective trainings, how to use training aids appropriately, ways to incorporate technology into training, group facilitation, and evaluation.

Then we had one week to put what we had learned to the test. We were tasked with writing an instruction plan and training guide for an upcoming course that we will actually be executing at our library system and we had to come back on March 26th to present a select portion of that training to our peers so we could receive feedback and so we could practice with a captive audience. This was an extremely valuable exercise. I was able to write my instruction plan and training guide for the self-defense program I'm presenting to the Washington County branch staff at their meeting on May 10th. I received some useful feedback that allowed me to edit my plan and guide to make the training more participant-friendly!

As I start to get ideas for home-grown continuing education/professional development (whatever you'd like to call them) courses, I will most definitely continue to write up instructional plans and guides for each one. These will come in handy as well if the libraries across the state move forward with the idea to form a staff development coop. The instructional guides and plans will be posted electronically for anyone to download and edit to suit their needs!

A couple of fun NJ facts:

• The bartender at the hotel I stayed at worked as an extra for the TV show, The Sopranos.
• You cannot pump your own gas at NJ gas stations. They are full-service only.
• You cannot make left turns off of most NJ highways; instead, you have to use these things the natives call Jug Handles...they're like sideways horseshoes.

Klickatat and all that

PLA in Portland and the home of the Quimby family.    Lots of new ideas to think about and its always good to wander amidst people who have the same interests as you so when you suggest something wacky, at least they have a context.

One idea that struck me in these tough economic times was if we have to limit our collection spending than we need to be as fast and efficient as possible getting items back on the shelves.   The session on "leaning your library " covered this area and reminded me of Frederick Taylor's  time and motion studies, plus the recently in vogue ISO 9000 certification.  Ask at your library, how many people touch an item before it is back on the shelf?  Can you get it back to the shelf in less than 5 touches?

Unfortunately the LITA top ten tech trends was not their best work.  If you think about time, convenience, and independence as the new currency, how can libraries assist our patrons make the most of their daily lives?  Can technology help?    Can technology help us form better relationships with our patrons?

Some good and reasonably priced stuff in the vendor areas as well.  I was pleased to find web based scheduling software for our whole system would cost about $330.  What do you think, would you like centralized scheduling of all staff?

Also thanks to some good questions, it dawned on me that if patron reviews of books is to succeed (be used by other patrons) in our catalog, we need a lot more reviews and multiple reviews per item.  Which brought me to chilfresh a company that can insert those reviews and comments from patrons around the work into our catalog.

Visiting vendors also helped clarify the path so that our patrons can pay their fines by credit or debit card from within the library and from home.  

Thanks for the invitation to post on the WMRL Learning blog.
Please share your comments and ideas here or my blog.

PLA Conference March 2010

The Public Library Association (PLA) Conference was held in Portland, Oregon March 23-27th. The city of Portland has a wonderful transportation system that enabled conference goers to easily travel from area hotels to the convention center, not to mention area shopping and restaurants, for free. The system even went to the airport for a small fee.

The workshop highlights for the conference for me were Book Buzz with Nancy Pearl, What's New in Fantasy, Paranormal, and Science Fiction for Teens and Adults (a gift to myself :), and oddly enough, I Have These Statistics--Now What? Getting Started on the Path of Collection Analysis. Other highlights for me included hearing the keynote speaker, Pulitzer Prize winning speaker Nick Kristof and listening to a short concert by Natalie Merchant prior to the keynote. These two individuals started things off on an inspiring and positive note, as they each spoke of the impact libraries had on their own successful lives. They also provided critical reminders of the great difference librarians can make daily in the lives of our customers and in our communities, things that go way beyond the collections and walls of the buildings to the heart of libraries: the interactions of the customers and the library staff.

In addition, a lot of my focus for the conference was on collections and collection development, so I also took the opportunity to visit the booths in the exhibit hall. I picked up a couple of galley copies of Fang by James Patterson and The Passage by Justin Cronin. I also spoke with some vendors like BWI, discussing their services and discounts; checked out Brainfuse to compare it with Tutor.com; spoke to our ILS vendor TLC to ask some questions and make some suggestions; and scoped out some library card vendors for our upcoming First Library Card project. (I may have picked up a free cookie here and there along the way!)

I've come back with some definite ideas and action items: First, I am running reports to get relative use figures for our collections to help us better identify where our weeding needs to go deeper and what areas of our collection are successful and need to be expanded. My goal is to complete these reports and present findings within the month so that we can move forward with next fiscal year's collection budget allotment with accuracy. Next, I am going to follow up with some other collection vendors to see if they offer competitive pricing, convenient services, etc. Finally, I've got some good information to use for my proposal/plan for the First Library Card.

Thanks to Western Maryland Regional Library for supporting the trip to the conference.

Learn How to Learn Online (LHTLO)

Staff Name: Julie Zamostny

Workshop: Learn How To Learn Online (LHTLO)

Library System: WMRL

Date: January 19, 2010

Aha! to share: The whiteboard is a great space to use to encourage participation. I never had an instructor use the whiteboard area in a collaborative fashion before!

Questions to ask yourself:

• What barriers do I have to synchronous learning?
• How can I overcome those barriers when I'm learning and when I'm teaching?

Rating: 3 stars; There was nothing terribly wrong with the course but the topic is something that I'm fairly familiar with and would have preferred to participate in an asynchronous course in order to get up to speed with Wimba.

Additional notes: I made a contact with Trina Panagos at Frederick County Public Library and we are hoping to work on a synchronous training project involving Google Wave in the future.

SkillSoft Kick-off Session 2009

Relevance?

I recently attended a workshop presented by OCLC. Some of the talk was promotion of the various WorldCat entities, not relevant to me. What was relevant was a talk by Michael Edson, Director, Web and New Media Strategy, Smithsonian Institution, Office of the CIO entitled Relevance, Existence, and the Smithsonian Commons.

The Smithsonian is the world largest museum and research complex. And yet on an issue they have spent much effort - the oceans, a 2 person website called Enchantedlearning.com gets many times more hits. What is wrong with their site? Why do people not start their research there?

So the Smithsonian has been working through issues like how their task should be to:
Empower citizen-scholars!
Solve big complex problems!
Interdisciplinary collaborations and partnerships!
Create innovative informal education
Use their resources for the public good in the midst of unceasing change

It seems to me this is the role of libraries too, and I would like to think, of Whilbr. Ok - Whilbr doesn't solve big complex problems but could empower citizen scholars, assist in interdiscplinary collaboration (as in C&O Canal project) and be part of innovative informal education.

Micheal used this image for the new model - collaboration and innovation



And I started thinking of the need for Whilbr in particular and libraries in general to move from the left image to the right. Hard to do, control is lost, possibly quality is lost but a common space where ideas are more freely exchanged seems relevant. Can we foster learning and collaborative knowledge creation? For Whilbr,
what can I do with this content once I find it? How can I interact with my fellow-visitors to the website?

More from Michael's talk can be found at http://www.slideshare.net/edsonm/michael-edson-relevance-existence-and-smithsonian-strategy-for-oclc-web-scale-or-bust

Introduction to Photoshop CS2-Online Class

Course Name: Introduction to Photoshop CS2-Online Class offered by Hagerstown Community College Center for Continuing Education

Course Description: The Introduction to Adobe Photoshop CS2 online class provided hands on, project-oriented lessons filled with detailed step-by-step instructions. In the introduction to the Photoshop environment I discovered tools that I had not used as of yet. Specifically, I learned two more ways to straighten and crop pictures. The lessons revealed how to edit photographs to remove red-eye, to get rid of dust and scratches, and correct image exposure. I’m amazed by the variety in the Photoshop’s brush engine and I’m overwhelmed by all the choices provided by Photoshop’s tools and procedures.

Course Mechanics: Two lessons became available every week for six weeks. After all twelve lessons were released there was a two week grace period to complete the lessons and take the final exam. This gave me an extra two weeks-a total of eight weeks to complete the course. I was able to print all the lessons and assignments-a very helpful reference. I will use these again to strengthen my skills in Photoshop and to better comprehend the procedures and options that Photoshop has to offer. After each lesson I took a brief multiple-choice quiz. Each lesson was accompanied by an assignment. The assignments helped me to better comprehend the steps and tools utilized.

Course Benefits: You do not have to be present when each lesson is released. This is very convenient. You can get online and do the lessons, assignments, quizzes, and test -24/7. The Continuing Education course is worth 24 hours. However, I worked an average of 3 ½ to 4 hours per lesson (not 2). I still need to go back and review all the tools and steps in order to grasp all the techniques. Having a printed copy is an excellent resource.