LIS May Staff Meeting Agenda
We have a staff meeting on Wednesday May 19th from 3-4PM in the Harman Reading Room. Here’s the agenda:
1. Announcements
2. Strategic Planning Website
https://sites.google.com/a/middlebury.edu/lis-strategic-planning/
4. Introduction of New Teams: Space, Security, Training & Education
http://www.middlebury.edu/offices/technology/lis/about/teams
We’ll have coffee available at 2:45.
– mike
Come Monday May 17 the LIS Technology Helpdesk will be relocating from LIB135 to LIB125. Our actual move of Helpdesk functions will begin Friday May 14 at 3:00pm. While the Helpdesk functions are being relocated to LIB125 the Helpdesk Student Consultants located at our Walk-In Helpdesk Center in LIB202 will be open for business to receive calls and process problems. The staff during the relocation will be engaged in the move. There should be minimal impact to our users during this move and we are confident that we will be back in full operation late Monday morning May 17. Thank you in advance for your patience and understanding during this transition time.
James Beauchemin x2019
Technology Help and Support Manager
Please join me in welcoming Dennis Hadley to LIS. Dennis started with us on April 12th and has assumed the position of Senior Technology Specialist at the Technology Support Helpdesk. Dennis comes to us from Paul Smith’s College in NY and brings a wealth of experience in higher-ed support and service to our helpdesk group and to our users. He has already taken the plunge into many support efforts and is adding more value to our group everyday! Please stop by the Technology Helpdesk and say hi to Dennis.
James Beauchemin
Technology Support Helpdesk
Thanks to all the LIS staff who responded to the LIS Website Team’s survey! There were 63 responses to our 2009 survey, prior to the redesign of the LIS Website, and 24 responses to our more recent survey, after the launch of the new site. In this post, I will share some of the results of these surveys and compare the feedback between the two surveys. I’ll discuss the student survey in another post.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most LIS staff still only feel ‘OK’ about navigating the website, but far fewer find it frustrating and some people actually love it now.
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!
