Someday I’d like to be so confident when presenting at a national conference that I can do it without a security blanket. Until then, I’ve got a print-out of my PowerPoint (with speaking notes), an e-mailed version, a version stored in Dropbox, and one on a flash drive. Charleston Conference, here I come!
This is a bar chart of e-journal usage (full-text downloads, using COUNTER JR1 reports) at my university over four years. What the heck happened in the spring of 2012? Everybody became super-users of our e-journal content. It wasn’t just one resource or collection getting increased usage, it was over our entire e-journal collection. This kind of anomalous spike in March, April, and May 2012 makes me feel a little like grumpy cat because I can’t explain the reason for it.
this work week has been full of good things, but a little too full. my brain is tired. luckily, the internet is also full of good things to take my mind off of work. here’s the “banana dance”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG8cbZL44VM&feature=youtube_gdata_player
every month, for the last five years, someone on our library staff has been charged with logging into our library management system and downloading a monthly report about the patron types that have used their library account to log in for off-campus access to an e-resource. those stats have been gathered in a folder on our shared network drive, and then they’ve been deleted from the system. as far as i can tell, these statistics have never been used in any kind of report or analysis. years worth of stats, never used. the task of downloading the stats has fallen to me, and guess what? i’m going to actually use them. 🙂 stay tuned.
my library is in on a university campus in southern california. some of our students get around campus on skateboards. the library has day-use lockers tall enough to store them, but most people just lean their skateboards up against the table they’re working at, or against the wall.
It seems like this year all content providers have decided to rethink their user interfaces, and since June we’ve managed the migration of five (Five! Count ’em!). Any migration is a pretty serious undertaking for us because I make sure we’re thorough, checking *everything* about the new interface when we make a change. If there are bugs, I want to find them before our users do. It’s quite a bit of work and it’s important work because I want our patrons to know that they can trust that we’re working on their behalf. As I’ve mentioned before (http://orgmonkey.net/?p=1382), if our patrons find the problems first, that breaks their trust with us. By providing consistently accessible e-resources I feel like I’m silently communicating to our patrons, “you can trust us.”
I wonder if any of you out there think about trust and the growing online delivery of library content? I’m beginning to read widely on the topic, especially related to marketing, starting with the following:
David C. Arnott, (2007), “Research on trust: a bibliography and brief bibliometric analysis of the special issue submissions,” European Journal of Marketing, 41(9): 1203-1240. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/03090560710773408
There are 643 references in that article, so I’ll be reading a while. If you’ve got other articles/books to suggest, please leave a comment.
