Organization Monkey

Gantt chartin’

Posted on April 1, 2013 by Marie Kennedy

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.

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Our book is released

Posted on March 25, 2013 by Marie Kennedy

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.

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Symbolism and Strategic Change in Academia

Posted on March 20, 2013 by Marie Kennedy

This week’s discussion in my fellowship program is about organizational culture and climate. We are assigned to read an article by Gioia et. al, which discusses an ethnographic approach to studying a university undergoing a strategic plan revision. Coincidentally, LMU is involved in strategic planning right now, so the article is very timely. An engaging part of the article is the analysis of the university task force assigned the development of the plan, how they come to grips with what “strategic planning” actually means, and what influences their decision process.

If I had to pick a ‘take-home’ sentence out the article, it would be the following, which I feel is often missed in the change processes that I’ve been involved with:

When people are called upon to enact some change in their existing patterns of thinking and acting, the proposed change must make sense in a way that relates to previous understanding and experience.

Gioia, Dennis A., James B. Thomas, Shawn M. Clark, and Kumar Chittipeddi. 1994. “Symbolism and Strategic Change in Academia: The Dynamics of Sensemaking and Influence.” Organization Science 5(3):363-383.

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That’s a valid point

Posted on March 8, 2013 by Marie Kennedy

haHA! Grabbed image from http://vassago.tumblr.com/post/44766938361. Thanks, @vassago!

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fun thing: SCELC Research Day

Posted on March 4, 2013 by Marie Kennedy

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.

^(a)Daniel O. O’Connor and Soyeon Park, “Crisis in LIS Research Capacity,” Library & Information Science Research 23 (2001): 105.

^(b)Lili Luo, “Fusing Research into Practice: The Role of Research Methods Education,” Library & Information Science Research 33 (2011): 191-201.

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hosting fees

Posted on February 20, 2013 by Marie Kennedy

oh man, we spend so much money on hosting fees! i need to start thinking about how we’re going to nip this problem in the bud. we are charged a hosting fee when we purchase an electronic resource; the provider usually charges us an annual fee for upkeep of that resource on their platform. in this way a purchase isn’t just a purchase, it’s an initial outlay of cash with additional payments every year, in perpetuity. i don’t see how we are going to be able to sustain this model.

i bumped into this screen shot on our shared network drive, of how we used to have to ask our system to give us a report of all the order records that had some kind of hosting fee. we weren’t consistent in our note-making of how we identified these fees. sometimes we called them ‘hosting fees,’ sometimes we called them ‘access fees,’ etc. we resolved this problem by creating a new fund code, ‘hose,’ and all of our hosting fees for e-content are now paid on order records using that code. no more notes, and a one-line report request: show me all the active order records with ‘hose’ as the fund. this new fund makes report-pulling very easy.

(good grief)

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