This three-part session covered quite a bit of interesting information about keeping staff educated about technology.
The first presentation was given by Leah White, of Northbrook Public Library, and Gwenyth Stupar, formerly of Northbrook Public Library but now of Barrington Area Library. As Northbrook is where I live (although not where I work) I was quite interested in seeing what they were doing there in the matter of staff education.
Leah and Gwyn described the multiple points and steps in their staff education program to make staff more comfortable in dealing with technology and helping patrons with technology. They emphasized the point that the best way to help patrons who are struggling with technology is to first train the staff so they can then help the patrons. It's necessary to get staff away from having an attitude of "Sorry, I have no idea how that works" toward an attitude of "No, I don't have one of those, but let's figure out what we need to do to get it to work."
They found that it is important to invest in devices for their staff to use so staff could become comfortable with the devices in low-pressure situations on library time. They also attached staff training to an existing routine of staff education, such as staff meetings. They made it into an event that their staff could get excited about and created a detailed workbook that staff could use to go step-by-step through the process of using a device, even if they were intimidated and completely flummoxed by the devices. They recommended creating a different workbook for each device and making the training of staff with the devices mandatory.
After piloting the program, they then rolled it out at Northbrook, eventually setting up a table at the train station at regular intervals so they could demonstrate downloadable ebooks to residents who might not come into the library.
Pamela Carson of Concordia University Libraries followed Leah and Gwyn with a presentation on lifelong learning and technology. This was a more general talk about lifelong learning, what benefits it has, how to foster it, and what kinds of people are more likely to gravitate to informal learning. As someone who as been learning many things informally for a long time I didn't find a great deal of new information in this presentation, but it did provide a nice overview of the subject and helped me consider that many people need to be encouraged to pursue this kind of informal education.
The final presentation of the session was by Michael Sauers of the Nebraska Library Commission. Michael briefly described the history that the state of Nebraska has had with the 23 things project that was extremely popular a couple years ago. In 23 things, 23 different kinds of tasks were explored with library staff at the many different libraries that implemented the project, all of which had something to do with Web 2.0 concepts. For instance staff had to use Facebook and Twitter, experiment with YouTube, and complete many different kinds of social networking tasks, writing a blog post about each experience. The goal was to keep staff up-to-date with technologies that patrons were using so they would be better equipped to assist them.
After their initial 23 things project, the Nebraska Library Commission decided to keep going. For some time now they've been adding a new thing every month and encourage librarians in the state of Nebraska to complete the newly introduced things in the period of the month when the thing has been introduced. If the requisite blog post is submitted within the month, staff get a credit towards keeping their librarian certification current. The Nebraska Library Commission has also started adding books to read to the list of possible things, rewarding credits for every 100 pages in the book (although the book has to be completed for any credits to be gained).
For libraries wishing to continue to push staff forward and keep them current, which was the whole goal of 23 things in the first place, it is wonderful that Nebraska keeps doing this. Many of the things in 23 things have now become less important than they were at the time, while other sites, such as Pinterest, didn't exist at the time the 23 things project was launched.
Their Things and BookThings can be found on the Nebraska Learns site (featuring a charming photo of Carhenge).
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