We offer a round of thanks to the following outgoing members for their efforts in the group since its inception in 2010:  Mack Roark, Andy Wentink and Kim Ehritt (College Advancement).

For the past few weeks the Reference & Instruction workgroup has taken the lead on posting content to this Page. Today we write to invite Fans and feedback from all of LIS (and beyond), and explain how you may help us make this page a vibrant and vital part of our online presence.

Who is this for/What is going to appear on the Page?:

We hope to focus the Page primarily toward students, but we also think the content and information shared there will be of interest to Staff and Faculty. We received feedback from SLAC (Student LIS Advisory Committee) that content postings to the Page should not be too frequent.

How will things be added?/I’d like to share something!:

If you have content you’d like to have featured on the LIS Facebook Page,  get in touch with the social media community managers, Jess Isler and Joy Pile.

Please let us know if you have questions or feedback to share about the Page. Thanks! Oh, and “Liking” the Page counts as feedback, too!

CTLR LMS Roundtable discussion

The first workshop in the 6th annual CTLR Pedagogy Series was a discussion of LMS platforms lead by Mary Ellen Bertolini, Jason Mittell and Louisa Burnham.  Online discussion, assignments and grading were all hot topics.

Sakai Overview and Training

Yesterday, Scott Siddall from Longsight, an open source service provider, lead a day long training session in Sakai.  A number of faculty have agreed to pilot Sakai this spring and attended the afternoon session to get an overview of the platform and hands-on training.  There will be more training sessions next week.  Here are dates:

• 10 – 11:30 am, Tuesday, Jan 18th, Library 105 – Shel Sax
• 2 – 3:30 pm, Thursday, Jan 20th, Library 105 – Shel Sax

Moodle Overview and Training

Tomorrow and Friday, I’ll lead a workshop on Moodle, providing an overview of this LMS platform and then hands-on training for faculty who have agreed to pilot it.  Here is schedule:

• 2 – 3:30 pm, Thursday, January 13, Library 105 – Alex Chapin
• 2 – 3:30 pm, Friday, January 14, Library 105 – Alex Chapin

While all of these training sessions are primarily for pilot participants, other faculty and staff are encouraged to attend at least the first part of these sessions where we’ll give an overview of the platforms and their distinguishing characteristics.

• Serve as main contact persons for questions about their sections of the site
• Ensure their section of the site is current and accurate (which may involve delegating tasks to others).
• Be aware of formatting, style, and other conventions used on the LIS/College web site and follow them when making changes.
• Keep current with the necessary skills and tools do this (or receive training)
• Consult with stakeholders before implementing major refresh & enhancements.

The team has created a wiki page (go/liswebcm) that  describes the role of the content manager, lists the names of content managers and the areas for which they are responsible, describes tools they can use to maintain content, and includes an FAQ section for anyone who may visit this page looking for answers. There is now also a “Problem with this Page?” link on each LIS page which can be used to communicate with the content managers about issues with pages such as broken links, misspellings, outdated content, etc.

We’d like to emphasize that content managers are not the only ones who make contributions to and work with the LIS website. The purpose of this contact list was to create quick access to specific “go-to” people responsible for the major parts of the site so that LIS staff would not have to spend much time determining whom to contact with questions.

If you have responsibility for a sub-section of the website, your content manager is not superseding you–you’re still responsible–but now you will hear from your content manager when you have to fix broken links, or when a design change needs to be made. More granular permissions for LIS pages in Drupal are managed using web data groups.

The team is now researching which platforms to include within the course hub. WordPress and MediaWiki are obvious choices since many faculty are already using these for course sites. The team also recognizes that some sort of learning management system (LMS) should also be an integral part of hub sites and is reviewing a number of LMS to present to the community as possible  candidates.

We’ve created one test for each of the four areas of the LIS Website. Each test has a different set of five questions. A test should only take 1-2 minutes to complete. Thanks for your help!

LIS Homepage

Library Homepage

Helpdesk Homepage

Curricular Technology Homepage

[Reminder: If you want to participate in usability testing, reply to the all-campus email that was sent Wednesday, April 7 with the times when you would be available.]

My Recommendations

• Establish education programs for RSS, surveying and using the research guides. LIS will soon be forming an Education & Training team and we should recommend that this team prioritize training programs on these services, which our survey showed were unfamiliar to a large portion of LIS staff and student workers. Training on surveying could include both how to use the survey tool as well as research best practices, an area where having a Faculty adviser would be very helpful.
• Improve visibility of the Emergency Protocols and make sure this information is up-to-date. Both LIS staff and student workers were largely unfamiliar with this documentation. Due to its nature, we need to make sure that these documents are available and understood.
• Advertise the website as a primary source for information. LIS staff reported that many people still contact them directly for information that is available on the website. When contacted, we should refer people directly to the website to encourage people to go there first in the future.
• Improve the Staff Directory. With so many staffing changes in the last year, and more to come, it’s understandable that we haven’t maintained the staff directory as well as we should. Hopefully, the Identity Management project will give us new ways to automate the staff directory and more information about its structure.
• Make LIS event and space information more visible. We’ll be working with the Events Management Office over the summer on additional scheduling tools for the spaces managed by LIS. We need to make sure that this information is prominently featured on the website.

Student Survey Results

Question 2: What features of the new LIS website work or could be improved?

The hours of service for the library and the locations of LIS services both improved with the new site. This is good, since our examination of analytics data showed that these are the most visited sections of the LIS website. Students are still largely unfamiliar with the research guides and the tagging features of our site.

Question 3: Is there information not on the LIS Website that would be useful to include?

There was no change in the LIS student workers’ response to this question between the 2009 and 2010 surveys. Most respondents still feel that the information that needs to be available on the LIS Website is present.

Question 4: What is your level of comfort with the following technologies?

There was increase comfort with all of the technologies on the 2010 survey with the largest improvements in Blogs, Wikis, and Content Management Systems. This was expected as these were the tools used to build the new LIS website and several student workers were involved in that effort. The respondents were less comfortable with RSS and surveying.

Data Sets

Full Student Worker Suvery 2009

Summary Student Worker Survey 2009

Full Student Worker Survey 2010

Summary Student Worker Survey 2010

Question 3: How important is it for you to reach each of these audiences with your web content?

There was little change between the 2009 and 2010 surveys in which audiences LIS staff see as the primary visitors for their sites. In general, LIS staff now feel that it is less important to reach all of the audiences, but reaching students, faculty and staff remain the primary audiences. Faculty is now the most important audience, where LIS staff had been the most important audience on the 2009 survey.

Question 5: How often do YOU use these LIS website features?

There was little change in the usage of LIS website features between the 2009 and 2010 surveys. There was a slight increase in the use of LIS Blogs and the LIS Wiki, which we anticipated as we’ve focused a large amount of effort to improve both of these platforms in the last year, particularly by adding documentation to our wiki. The only service that saw decreased usage was the LIS staff directory.

Because of the smaller number of responses on the 2010 survey, the increase usage of the LIS Blog and LIS Wiki is not noticable until you examine the responses for each category as a percentage of the total responses. This view for each of the items is shown on the charts below.

Question 6: What features of the LIS website could be improved?

There is a clear trend with each of the responses to this question: many of the staff who felt that each of these features could be improved in 2009 now feel that these features work on our site! However, there remains a large segment of LIS staff who are not aware of these features of the LIS site, suggesting both that LIS staff may not visit the LIS site often and, for those who do, we need to do a better job of promoting these features.

The one exception to this trend is emergency procedures, where fewer respondents in 2010 believe this section of our site works and a larger percentage are unfamiliar with this content. Given the nature of this information, especially its importance to LIS staff who were the subjects of these surveys, we need to focus on improving access to this information. Hours of service and space availability were other areas that saw less improvement than other features of the site, though both were improved between the two survey groups.

Question 7: Do users often contact you for information that is available on the website?

There was little change in the response to this question between 2009 and 2010, which might suggest that we need to improve advertising of the website as a primary source for information, or steer people who contact us to the website to find the information. We should ask people who contact us whether they checked the website to find this information first to determine if the issue is people not using self-service methods to get information or if the information is too difficult to find on the site.

Question 8: Is there information not on the new LIS Website that would be useful to include?

The 2010 survey shows a dramatic improvement in this metric. I believe this is a result of the process we conducted to transfer information to the new website: all information had to be transferred by hand so people doing the work put a lot of though into including only the necessary information. It’s also probable that the permissions system for our new site, which allows areas to add people to work on the site as needed, helps keep the site up-to-date as new staff can be added to work on a site.

Question 9: What is your level of comfort with the following technologies?

Overall, LIS staff are more comfortable with all of the technologies listed than they were in 2009. The largest growths in comfort were with Blogs and Wikis, probably as a result of their emphasized use as part of the new LIS website. The most pronounced growth in the highest level of comfort was with the use of RSS.

Question 11: Please rate your overall experience in navigating the LIS website.

Most LIS staff still only feel ‘OK’ about navigating the website, but far fewer find it frustrating and some people actually love it now.

Data Sources

Here are exports of the data used to create these charts. If you think I’ve misrepresented the information, please feel free to post your own results based on this data. Let us know your thoughts about the survey results in the comments section here. Thanks again to all of the staff who participated!

Full Survey Results 2009

Results Summary 2009

Full Survey Results 2010

Results Summary 2010

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