I also thought I would post a link to Jessamyn West’s (from librarian.net) very neat presentation on Web 2.0. I was a little late in finding this but I liked it so much that I decided to share it with my fellow reference people here.
Doing More With Less – Sensible Library Technology
She also has a wonderful one on tech support, and who hasn’t bemoaned that its not our job to handle it when patron’s ‘break their yahoo’ which happens with a frequency I don’t like to admit.
And so:
(Now) Teen Librarian M and I had our second session of our self developed Web 2.0 class for our library staff. This time most of those attending were from circulation, and some from the branches, which is always nice to see since we don’t get to really talk with them to much. The participants again ranged pretty well in age but I would hazard to say that the make up was slightly older this time, which is always interesting to investigate.
Things went slightly different this time and though in the first session we barely had enough time left to cover YouTube this go round we had enough time to actually go over everything we slated and had enough left over to mention a few new little fun things that I had found between then and now. (Including the very, very fun The Best Stuff in the World, which I discovered in a Best of the Best of Web 2.0 article on the totally awsome Software Development in the Real World site.) It seems perhaps we’ve found our groove and surprisingly enough the circulation staff had some very interesting insights for us as well.
One plan I’ve had ever since learning about it is using del.icio.us in our library to help empower the circulation staff who are still very shy about trying to answer reference questions, though they are supposed to be able to do so if a librarian is unavaliable. We have reference pods at our library and upon downloading Firefox (yay!) on the computers there the del.icio.us extension was added to offer immeadite access to reference links on the internet for anyone to use. This is quite pertinant since our websites link page is quite out of date and doesn’t look as if it’s going to change any time soon, despite our efforts. (But that’s another story.) I’ve also plans to do the same at the checkout pods to offer the circulation staff the same access as the librarians have. Hopefully this will help them and keep them from immeaditly running to Google. I’m planning to impliment this and from what I understand the assistant director is all for it. I hope for circulation feedback too, something I think they’ve never really had a chance to give concerning a project like this.
However, one of the circulation staff had a very interesting suggestion as well. She asked if it would ever be possible to install something like the del.icio.us button on the public internet computers we have so that patrons would know where to go for the sites they constantly come in looking for. I thought it was a very innovative idea and I think very viable if administration and IT were behind it. We’ll see just how far it ends up going though, as judging from our patrons and those who attend our public computer classes I’m not sure if our community is quite ready for that. However, I would love if eventually, after all the library staff is trained, to make the Web 2.0 class public to show our patrons just what is out there. One can certainly dream, anyway.
And in other, slightly related, news my proposed blog was approved so our library will finally have its own which I believe is an incrediably positive step in the right direction. Lets hope we take many more.