11:00 AM session

Great group, great ideas, great camaraderie. Let's keep this going by adding other items we discussed. Plus there is an area at the bottom on this page for additional information and suggestions that you wish you would have said or thought about later.

What are some challenges of providing Staff Development?

• Providing good customer service - getting staff who are introverts to be extroverts while working on the desk or with the public
• Having a locationfor training - one library doesn't have private staff areas and everything from training tohaving lunch must be done in the public area
• Some staff are not comfortable making their own decisions
• Getting administration to buy into the need for staff development and training

What are you doing that is working?

• Offer rewards to staff who complete staff training, take the initiave to learn something new, or go the extra mile
• a picture of a globe given tostaff members when someonenoticed that they did something well
• kudo blog on staff intranet others providelifesavers or donuts
• budgeted $3000 to purchase MP3 players for staff who completed staff training (actually ended up costing $1000 less because by the time staff completed the trainingMP3 players had gone down in price)
• Providing an extra 5 cents an hour for those who have cross trained
• Tech Squad - identify best techie folks in each area to be on the Tech Squad who work asfirst contact people - need to have this duty in position description or performance expectation, etc. Some areas have a higher tech knowledge than other areas, but it is working well
• Lightening Talks at All Staff Meetings each month - 5 minutes to demonstrate new technology or gadget
• Tech Training Days for all their libraries
• Changing roles in libraries, wikis, blogs, web 2.0
• Tech Talk - offer sessions on how to assist users with wireless set up, web 2.0, Facebook, Myspace, downloadable audio books, Media and disk files, and offer q&a for staff
• LibStats - reference question statistics tracker: http://code.google.com/p/libstats/

How do you currently receive staff training?

• Web Junction
• Some partner with Human Resources, Career Services, or Chamger of Commerce
• Professional Development Committee

What training or staff development do you requirestaff to complete in your libraries?

• 5-week summer training, some topics include:
• How to know if you are conducting a good reference interview
• Advanced internet searching
• Organization communication
• Disaster training
• How to disperse communication (telephone, e-mail, wiki, blog, web page, etc.)
• Roaming reference program
• Reference batting practice - classify reference actions according to baseball words - home run, strike out, foul ball, etc. Discuss how you could have handled it better and others offer suggestions
• Monthly training for Reference Desk staff - librarians and other specialists are invited to talk for 45 minutes about sources, database changes, etc. in their area
• Fish - Customer Service - http://www/enterprisemedia.com
• Give them the Pickle - customer service video http://www.giveemthepickle.com

What else are you doing?

• Using wikis because phone are not always available and version control was difficult with email
• Learning 2.0 -http://plcmcl2-about.blogspot.com/ "explore new technologies and reward them for doing 23 things"

Other interesting stuff?

• Google Docs
• Library 2.1
• New tools: Jott & Twitter

Add items you'd like to add here that were not talked about during our session: