Organization Monkey

Classes are over for this academic semester, grades are in, and now it’s time to … WORK FAST. During the semester we try to keep our e-resources as stable as possible, so that students have the same experience every time they use a resource. Think of it as a slooooow dance step. When the students are no longer engaged in research our e-resources staff move quick, quick, to make any needed changes to platforms, URLs, and title lists. We’ve only got one week before the summer session begins.

image found at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rumba2.png

Because sometimes usage statistics of e-content brings about more questions than they answer.

http://stripgenerator.com/strip/737211/what-usage-statistics-cant-tell-us

I don’t know if it’s because I’ve just been through the book publishing process and am extra sensitive to page design, but I think the layout of my new article at Collaborative Librarianship is really nice. Take a look? Shout out to @jokrausdu for taking such good care of my latest endeavor. I slipped him one of these monkey bucks for his effort.

http://collaborativelibrarianship.org/index.php/jocl/article/view/204
Collaborative Marketing for Electronic Resources: A Project Report and Discussion of Implications
Collaborative Librarianship, Vol 5, No 1 (2013)
Abstract: This article reports on the design and findings of a project concerning the feasibility of a collaborative model to benchmark the marketing of electronic resources in institutions of higher education. This inter-national project gathered 100 libraries to move in lockstep through the process of a typical marketing cycle that included running a brief marketing campaign and reporting findings to each other. The findings show good reasons and strong support for this kind of model.

When we put our electronic resource management program into action there were a lot of details to keep organized, tracked, and scheduled. As it turns out, our little experiment of using Gantt software to help us has been wonderful. We’ve been using the free software ganttproject. I was just puttering around in it earlier and exported the data into an Excel spreadsheet so I could color the tasks that have been completed. Ah, success. We still have things to do but it is a weight off my mind to know that I don’t have to remember to do x or y. I’ve got ganttproject to keep everything contained.

Cue the disco ball drop and pop open the champagne, our book is published. Here’s a link to the official press release: http://www.americanlibrariesmagazine.org/news/ala/how-do-it-manual-marketing-libraries-electronic-resources.

It’s out there in the wild now!

Kennedy, Marie R., and Cheryl LaGuardia. 2013. Marketing Your Library’s Electronic Resources: A How-To-Do-It Manual. Chicago: ALA.

Every year our regional licensing consortium, SCELC, hosts  a colloquium and a vendor day. This year the Dean of the Library and I coordinated with them to add a new themed event: Research Day. Tomorrow is the inaugural event and much of it will be live-streamed: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/scelc. Here’s a link to the schedule of events, which includes education sessions as well as plenty of peer-talk time: http://scelc.org/research-day/schedule.

We’ve designed the day to be an educational and networking event, with a focus exclusively on research. Here’s what we know about training in research methods in librarianship: In 2001 O’Connor and Park noted, “Only half of the 24 top-rated programs required MLS students to take research methods.” ^(a) In February 2010 61% of the 49 American Library Association (ALA)-accredited LIS degree programs with online information about degree requirements listed research methods as a required course in the curriculum. ^(b) By the time librarians are working professionals they have either never had a course in research design or the time lag has caused that coursework to be ineffective. This Research Day is a small step at beginning to turn that around. The goal of Research Day is to help librarians move forward with their research ideas and projects. The morning sessions are designed to improve one’s research skills, with presentations on quantitative methods, qualitative methods, choosing an appropriate methodology, analyzing data and results, and writing a research grant proposal. The afternoon provides an opportunity for librarians to report on their own research, through oral presentations or poster sessions, and to identify potential research partners or a network of support.

We have bigger plans for this that are under wraps for now but are excited to begin actively engaging on this topic with the 122 librarians who have signed up to attend the free day-long event. Check in with us via streaming (9:00am–12:15pm, then 2:30pm–4:30pm PST) or watch this space for updates about how the event turned out.