Thursday, June 18, 2009

Valuing your library services


Buried way down at the bottom of the 6/17/2009 ALA Direct e-Newsletter is a blurb and a link to a Retail Value Calculator (from the Nation Network of Libraries of Medicine, Mid-continental Region) which allows you to "Calculate what it would cost to buy library services - at a book store, through pay per view for articles, from an information broker - if you and your library weren't there."

I tested it a little bit with some Annual Report data for circulation statistics. It's pretty eye-popping on several levels!

  1. What the heck does NYS actually do with the data it collects?? Looking at this calculator - admittedly designed for medical libraries, which house different types of (very expensive research oriented) materials - it's really difficult to slot our data into these categories. For example, we seem to track the number of participants, but not the number of programs held; we lump video, audiobook, eBook, and periodical loans together as "other materials" (??!!??) although we do count how many of these various things we have...; we track the number of "Users of Electronic Resources" but not the uses of the electronic resources, or even the type of electronic resources, themselves. Maybe (hopefully!) I'm missing some key info here, but, seriously...
  2. How seriously are we undervaluing our services? As an example, say your library circulated 25,000 books in one year. At $35 per item per transaction (figuring most books at retail price are about $25 plus some extra for all the processing, handling, etc.) the cost of those transactions come to $875,000.00. That's just one service!

Monday, June 15, 2009

Eureka moment #1 - Job Aids are Very Important

In my first post-ASTD comments, I wrote about informal learning and patted myself on the back for a few right-track ideas. Here’s one of which I am particularly proud—

Weekly Workflows [edited to add link to past WWs - internal only link, login required - L.]

Who’d have thought? I like writing them, and have received positive feedback about them, but I never really thought of them as a key part of the overall training initiative. But as it turns out, job aids – the class of learning documents to which things like Weekly Workflows belongs – play an important role in informal learning, learning transfer, and post training support.

Definition: A job aid is an external resource designed to support a performer in a specific task by providing information or compensating for lapses in worker memory. (Job Aids Basics, ASTD Press. Read a sample in Google Books)

The good things about job aids:

  • Targets a specific issue
  • Focuses on performance
  • Quick reminders
  • Point of need guidance
  • Low cost to prepare and distribute
  • Minimize time away from the job/task

So the questions now are:

  • How can these job aids be even better?
  • What topics need to be covered?
  • Where’s the fine line between enough and too much?
  • Should hand outs from training sessions be comprised of jab aids, rather than less-than-informative PowerPoint slides?
  • Is there a design or style that would be an improvement?
  • What could I, and others at PLS, be doing to facilitate libraries in getting and/or creating these types of materials?
  • How can we take tools that already have a solid foundation and take them up a notch?

I’m sure every single library has its own job aids – wouldn’t it be beneficial to share the wealth and increase the “knowledge pool”? (This comes from a book I scored from the Expo floor, and which may form the basis of my possible “Business Skills Self Help Book Club”… )