Library orientation video

Inspired by an orientation presentation we’ve been doing all summer for freshmen & their parents, we now have a self-running orientation “video” that can be played for students.

I created this version when another librarian asked me if we had something we could provide a faculty member who wanted to just play something as students were walking in and getting settled into the class. This just happens to be one of the Centennial Hall classes this semester – one that has 1,200 students enrolled.

I want to add music to this, but in the meantime it’s a nice silent presentation. I created it using the flash-editor program, FlyPaper. Take a look!

The Amazing Library Race 2008

This past Friday we held the 3rd annual Amazing Library Race: Desert Edition at the UA’s Main Library. We broke previous numbers and had 210 participants show up, including students, staff, faculty, and community members. To learn more about this event and how it all works, see my post from last year.

Amazing Library Race - Public Library Station

As an organizer this year, I spent all morning helping with setup and coordinating volunteers, then was a floater during the actual event, and helped with take down. By the time the Amazing Happy Hour started at 5:00 I was completely exhausted. But it was well worth it, and here’s why:

• Participants really learned a lot about library resources and services. They also learned about how to navigate the 5 story building, which is often intimidating – not to mention confusing – for newbies.
• It is the only event held in the library where we have this substantial number of participants who are our primary audience. Exhibits, lectures, and other events don’t even come close. The energy that’s present up and down the library stacks is something you really only get to see this one time a year.
• Marketing a lot this year has made the event known to the campus community. Even those that didn’t make it to the event itself very likely heard about it. We had hundreds of table toppers in the student union that week, and posters around University Blvd. where students are constantly passing by. While we only reached a small percentage of our audience during the actual 2 hour event, we reached many more in other ways.
• This event promotes an image that the library isn’t usually known for. Libraries and the people that work in libraries are fun. And approachable. And we want to help.
• Those that work in the library get to all come together to make this event possible. I coordinated over 60 volunteers to staff the stations & help with set-up and take-down. It’s a great opportunity to work with people you don’t see every day and don’t otherwise get to work with.
• Word of mouth is powerful. I think this event is extremely important, and hope those that joined us that day share some of what they learned with friends, classmates, and colleagues. The actual impact of this event is difficult to measure, but I truly think it has the potential to educate library users far and wide about the many services we offer.

Amazing Library Race - Presentation Practice Room

A few things were organized differently this year:

• Rather than having a raffle at the end of the event where we later contacted prize winners, we gave away all of our prizes during the actual event (with the exception of the grand prize – an IPod). To win prizes, students completed an activity or played a game. 4 prize stations could be found along the trail, but they weren’t advertised to avoid those stations getting backed up. Those that were successful could pick from a list of prizes. As time went on, obviously, the list got smaller. All prizes were gone soon after 2:00. The prize activities were:

Media Station: Play “Scene It?“. This could be answering a question about a movie clip, placing films in the order in which they were released, or guessing what movie an image is from.

Middle Eastern Studies Collection Station: Capitals of the Middle East. Pick a slip from a hat, where there would be the name of a Middle Eastern country’s capital. Correctly state the country’s name and you win. (We had a map displayed of the Middle East to help out a bit).

Reference Desk Station: Knock Down a Librarian. My wonderful colleague Forrest let us borrow his librarian action figure which we set up on a table with a backdrop of reference materials. You stand behind the line, are given a ball, and get one shot to knock her down.

Amazing Library Race - Knock Down a Librarian Game

Express Check-Out: Find a Bookmark. You select a book from a cart of books about desert survival. If the book you pick has an Amazing Race bookmark in it, you win.

• We also had some new stations this go around:

• University College. This is located in the Integrated Learning Center (ILC) right off the courtyard where we have our final station of free pizza, soda, & eegees. Undecided students, which is much of our audience, are a part of this college and receive advising here. Keith Rocci – who is also our partner in crime for the Skillful Researcher course – staffed this station and had students answer riddles to win a ton of prizes that they had purchased.
• Reference Desk. This was a station before but it was combined with the Presentation Practice Rooms; this time it stood alone so it could focus more on the reference services provided at this site.
• Maps. We added this to the microforms station, which is in the same section on the first floor, so students could pick between answering a maps question (based on maps on display) or a microforms question (based on microforms on display where they had to use the machine to find a certain news story). We also displayed a number of globes, including globes of the moon and astronomical globes, which many library users don’t even know that we have.

Amazing Library Race - Maps Station

• We invited students from SIRLS to volunteer for the event. Two did, and after helping handout flyers around campus they got to staff the stations, promote library services, interact with librarians, and have some fun participating a large scale orientation event.

• And we’re working harder to get feedback, so we can prove to the library that this event is worth the time, effort, and money that goes into it. We took CatCard numbers at the opening station so we can gather details on who participated. We are also going to send out a Survey Monkey to gather better feedback from both participants and volunteers. This is all in addition to the feedback form all the participants were asked to fill out during the race. My hope is that once we collect this data, we will have a stronger argument for why this event is important, why it should continue to be supported in the future.

NOTE: video from the event coming soon…

New Year’s Resolutions for Libraries & Librarians

This week we embark another new year.  The world of libraries is always talking about change and moving forward, so what are your library’s new year’s resolutions?  Below are some of my ideas for resolutions for libraries & librarianship as we enter 2008:

1. Continuous Learning & Sharing of Knowledge. Just think, if each librarian at your institution learned about one new gadget or piece of technology per day we would always be surrounded by creative ideas and solutions.  Think of all the open source software that’s out there that isn’t being utilized in libraries.  All the Firefox add-ons (screen grab has pretty  much changed my life) that none of us even know about.  Let’s all commit to taking a few minutes every day to find something new, experiment with it, and when we find something useful – share what we find with our colleagues.  Props to those that are already doing exactly this.
2. Marketing, Library-Style.  Marketing appears to be a relatively new concept in libraries, but with the constant budget cuts and fighting for support we really need to take it seriously.  To be honest, my initial reaction when I saw the word “marketing” in a SIRLS class was pretty negative.  It sounds business, corporate, and equivalent to “advertising” which makes me think of deceiving people into buying something they don’t need.  But in reality, there is much more to marketing than public relations and advertising.  Creating a marketing plan for your library requires assessment, analysis, and refinement of vision, mission & objectives.  A marketing plan can increase a library’s worth and its visibility in your community, and in the world of academic libraries it can ultimately increase student success.  So maybe it’s not so bad.  Maybe it’s necessary to move libraries forward in the right direction; to keep us relevant and responsive to our users.  So resolution number two for libraries: create a marketing plan.  For librarians: listen to your customers, and use marketing tools to increase the visibility of your library and its services.
3. Emerging Technologies.  I’m not going to say “library 2.0″ because that phrase has become so overused that it’s starting to lose all meaning.  But I will throw these nuggets out there:  educational technology, collaborative technology, technology for assessment, open source technology.  It’s all over, and has the power to transform libraries into thriving educational environments that inspire learning, discovery, and creativity – both physically and virtually.  Third resolution: utilize these technologies (wisely, of course) to improve your library both within your organization internally and externally with what you library has to offer its users.
4. Usability.  Libraries are coming to realize that navigating their websites, and their OPACs particularly, are not intuitive to users.  If you have any say whatsoever in your own library’s website, make reading Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think first on your list if you haven’t done so already.  Hold usability testing to see what library users actually have trouble with when searching for library services & materials.  Advocate for better information architecture in databases your library subscribes to.  Don’t jeopardize the friendliness of your library by having a poor web presence.  So as a final resolution: make sure your library users can easily use your library’s services.  Make sure they are not afraid of it, or frustrated by it, and if they are – fix it.

These resolutions are pretty broad but they are intended to be, and in reality I don’t think they are difficult to achieve.  And I’m thinking they will be well worth it, so I will try to hold myself to them.

The Amazing Library Race

Recently I participated in the UA Library’s 2nd Annual Amazing Library Race. It was even bigger and better than last year, with somewhere around 300 participants, mostly new UA students. The event is held the Friday before classes begin, and is aimed to be an orientation to the library and its services for new students. It’s loosely based on the Amazing Race reality show, and we call ours the “Desert Edition” so many of the questions along the way relate to “surviving & thriving in a desert university.”

I staffed the first station along with a couple other staff members, including Chris from our Undergraduate Services Team (UST), Sam from External Relations, and Yvonne, a library student who was a former intern for UST. This station was the entrance to the race, right outside the Main Library. I was absolutely astounded when I arrived at two minutes before the race was due to start, and there was a line of students stretching around the side of the building. Incredible! Unfortunately we were so swamped at that point no one thought to take a picture, but we have several witnesses

We gave incomers their maps, carabiners (transcribed with the “UA Libraries” logo), and their first “passport” stamp proving they completed the first station. About every ten or so people would win a free gift bag with goodies including a library t-shirt, free slice of pizza (donated by our local Magpies), and earplugs.

There were 12 stations total, located on every floor of the library and in our Special Collections nextdoor. Tasks included checking-in and out material using our Express Check machines, finding information from an article on microfilm, visiting our new Presentation Rooms, and even making ice cream! The ice cream was at the Science-Engineering Library (SEL) station. Rather than make the students travel around campus in the heat to our other locations, SEL and Fine Arts (FA), we just made stations for them at the Main Library. Students learned about the specialty software located at SEL and the selection of music and architecture material located at FA. They learned about the streaming video we now offer, the exhibits in Special Collections, the photocopying and scanning services, our government documents and area studies collections, and of course our reference services. This year we introduced a Pima County Public Library (PCPL) station, staffed by PCPL librarians who marketed their own services and signed people up for library cards.

The participants could go to stations in any order they chose; this prevented stations from getting swamped all at once. Each station required the participant answer a question to receive a stamp. Once receiving four stamps, they could go to the “Desert Oasis” and receive a free water bottle. Once receiving 8 stamps, they could go to the final stop and get free pizza, eegees, and enter a raffle. We received fantastic sponsorship this year and had a ton of raffle prizes, including an Ipod, TV with DVD player, and giftcards to all over the place.

The race lasted two hours, and while exhausting was a fantastic experience and a really great event for the library. The students loved it. Some actual feedback I heard from participants included:

“This is fabulous! Just fabulous!”

“I’ve been to the library before but learned a lot more about its services I never knew!”

“This is great that you guys do this. Cool!”

I hope this continues as an annual orientation event, while it’s a lot of work it is definitely worthwhile.

A Day at the Fair

Yesterday I had the privilege of volunteering for the Pima County Public Library (PCPL) table at the Pima County Fair. Along with my colleague Freddy and PCPL’s organizer Liz, we staffed the table for four hours. As well as being a great chance to mingle with community members and find out their perceptions of their local library, it was an opportunity for me to learn more about what the public library offers. Not only do they have downloadable audiobooks, which I’ve known for awhile, they also now have streaming video available! Very cool.

Highlights included helping passersby sign up for library cards, offering to mail them a card for free if they like. Then having the kids spin the Library Wheel & answer a question about the library to get a prize. This game gave children and parents alike information on library cards, the library’s website, what’s held in the collection, the Teen Zone, and more. As well as stickers and magnets, prizes included funky bookmarks with the library’s name and website printed at the bottom. These were the most popular of the giveaways.

This was a great illustration of how to make the library visible. This has been an ongoing theme in the Marketing course I’m taking right now at SIRLS. Having this sort of presence at the county fair will encourage current library users and expose library services to otherwise non-users. It will tell us what the community thinks about us, and can be a good way to gather customer feedback while also demonstrating that the library is a fun place. It gives the library presence and personality.

One last note: possibly my favorite moment was when a woman stopped by and said to us, “The library is what holds the world together. It’s education.” Brilliant and true.