Director’s Thoughts – 2/20/19

This week, I held my third staff training day. We close the library on President’s Day and I spend time training staff on customer service ideals, weeding practices and whatever else I need to discuss! Unfortunately, because much of my staff is part-time, I can’t ask them to spend a whole day at the library for training, so I offer a three-hour training in the morning and then repeat it in the evening.

This year, my main focus is spending time devoted to promoting online resources. My staff range in age from 14 (pages) to around 75 years old. So there is a wide-range in the staff’s comfort level using technology. So, for three hours I went over tips and tricks on using our catalog (which can be super-clunky), the online registration calendar, and reviewing the information available on our website. Then I took the rest of the time and highlighted some of the many online resources we have available to patrons.

Sadly, these resources don’t get much use, but I think there are many factors for that:

1. Staff don’t know much about them and therefore can’t promote them to patrons.
2. They’re buried deep in our website.
3. We don’t promote them like we do our programs.
4. Most people use Google to find information and don’t think about using the library.

That being said, I created an online resource framework to encourage my staff to become more familiar with these resources. For 20 of our online resources, I created a five questions exercise for staff to complete. They only have to complete 10 out of the 20 exercises and have the whole year to complete them. There are three main resources that everyone must review, while the other seven are up to staff to choose.

I don’t want to create more work for my staff, but I also realize that people learn in different ways, so now I’ve talked about them in a meeting, I showed them how to access many of the resources online, and now they get the chance to use them.

Beyond just training and creating exercises for my staff to complete, I’ve also created social media posts for 25 different online resources that all look and feel very similar, but give information about different online resources and their benefits. These images are available for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and each fit (the current) image specifications.

Plus, I’m also offering computer classes to our patrons highlighting different resources for them to explore. Overall, my goal is to have more usage of these resources by the end of the year and through staff training and promotion, I hope it works!

How do you promote your library’s online resources?