One of my late night brainstorms from the Missouri Library Association conference is coming to fruition. Lightning Learning @ Your Library begins this Tuesday. The project, of course, went through some transition from idea to implementation, so I'll describe in detail what we are actually doing.

We will be doing six fifteen-minute drop-in instruction sessions during the next three weeks conducted by four different librarians. All of our marketing material refers to this web page with the dates, times, and locations.

We are starting all sessions at fifteen minutes after the hour to emphasize the fifteen-minute length--and because on our campus classes usually start at seven minutes after the hour (a ten-o'clock class is really 10:07 to 11:00). If someone shows up to a fifteen-minutes session seven minutes late, they missed it! So we thought the odd start time would help get people there on time.

We have been told by other people on campus that the 4 o'clock hour can be a good time for a student activity since most classes are over but students are still on campus. So we selected Tuesday at 4:15 as one start time.

The other time, Fridays at 12:15, honors the original idea for fifteen-minute sessions. Our Social Work librarian offers fifteen-minute lunch time sessions at her library. The Social Work school doesn't have classes during the noon hour and she finds that some students are willing to give up fifteen minutes of their lunch time for some library instruction. Classes throughout our campus tend to end early on Fridays, so we thought that this time would be a good alternative to the Tuesday times.

Session Topics

The first two sessions are, essentially, the two things that librarians would most like to cover in our EComp 101 instruction sessions but there just isn't enough time. Searching 102 will about why good searchers learn to love Boolean operators. Find It! 102 will be about the advanced features of our metasearch program.

The second two sessions are our acknowledgement that students are going to use Google so they might as well use it well. This is material that we have been asked not to provide during EComp 101 sessions (and wouldn't have time for, anyway).

The fifth session is the one I will teach and is essentially Bloglines for Students in Three (and a half) Easy Steps (analogous to my handout, Bloglines for Librarians in Three (and a half) Easy Steps).

The sixth session was originally going to be mine as well. I was going to cover Keeping Organized as a student, but I didn't find anything that I really wanted to teach. I covered my explorations in these posts: Z is for Zotero, Review: EndNote Web, and Research Management. Fortunately, another librarian wanted to do a session on Library of Congress Subject Headings, so I gave her my time slot.

Marketing

In the past, we have had discouraging turnout to instruction sessions offered outside of ones that are tied to classes. My hope is that shorter sessions will draw more people, but I was also pretty sure that more marketing was required. I have spent more time on marketing efforts for these sessions than I have preparing for them. Here's what we did:

• Posters. The Earth and Planetary Sciences library has a large format printer I've been dying to try, so I made two posters for Lightning Learning. The lobby poster has the times, locations, and brief descriptions of all six sessions. The other poster will sit outside the room where the session is offered--it has the lightning bolt, headline, and a big arrow pointing to the room. As you can see, my color scheme is electric blue and black. I intend to steal the lobby poster for a few hours tomorrow to display at our table during the Student Activities Fair.


• Flip chart. This will be as I described in my original brainstorm post. I plan to make it this afternoon, assuming we don't get a sudden rush of patrons at the Reference Desk on a snowy Sunday.


• Library's Web Site. The Lightning Learning sessions are currently featured on the What's New box on the library's home page, blog, and web page.


• Facebook. I made an event for each of the six sessions on Facebook.


• LiveJournal. I haven't done it yet, but the day before each session, I'll make an announcement on the Live Journal for Washington University Students.


• Bookmarks. Our library assistant designed bookmarks on electric blue cardstock. We gave these to the EComp 101 instructors so they could let their classes know about the sessions, most of which will take place before our normal EComp 101 instruction sessions for the semester. We will also be handing them out tomorrow evening at the Student Activities Fair.


• Flyers. I posted flyers on bulletin boards around campus last week. The design is similar to the lobby poster. The tear-off tabs have the web address to the Lightning Learning web page.

Assessment

Since we, like other academic libraries, are developing a culture of assessment, we wanted a way to ask students how Lightning Learning worked for them. Rather than take time away from our short session for a paper survey, I developed this survey at Survey Monkey (don't take it--you'll mess me up!).

We're going to ask for the email address of each attendee. Since it's no great treat to get to fill out a survey, we'll be offering a link to the virtual handout of the session as an enticement for them to give us their emails. That way students don't need to take notes during the session. The virtual handouts aren't ready for prime time--let me know if you see any typos, etc.

Comments are open for suggestions, discussion, or ideas for future programs.

2007-01-18

How you can get a library job, too

Yesterday was my one year anniversary as a librarian. Since I just completed my first service on a search committee, I thought I would honor the occasion by offering job searching advice. I was pretty much on target when I wrote "How I got a library job" a year ago. I have three things that I would emphasize more strongly than I would have thought before I was on a search committee.

1. There is very little that a job candidate can do for him or herself. It all comes down to the pool of candidates and the ever elusive concept of "fit."

If you make sure that your cover letter and resume reflects all relevant experience, then you have done all you can to make yourself stand out in the pool. I do mean all experience--we did not distinguish between work experience, class projects, and volunteer or internship work. We didn't care if it came before, during, or after graduate school. If it was relevant, we were interested. If you're unlucky enough to not have the top three applications in the stack, you won't get an interview. That is not a personal rejection, just a comparison of your relevant experience with everyone else's.

The people who are brought in for interviews all have experience that's relevant to getting the job done. At that point, "fit" is the primary criterion for selection. It's essentially asking ourselves if this person can do this job in this environment without driving him/herself crazy or driving other people crazy. Here again, there's not a lot the job seeker can do to convince the search committee that he or she "fits" (although enthusiasm, see point 3, is a factor). You can be a wonderful person with wonderful experience and express enthusiasm, and still not fit in our organization. If you are all those things, you will surely fit in some organization but you won't fit in every organization. The silver lining, here, is that you don't want to be in a place where you don't fit anymore than the organization wants you there--although that's often hard to see when you are in the midst of the stress of a job search.

My advice is to find a way to cope with the uncertainty and lack of control in the job hunt process. I realize now that I had even less control than I thought. If you can adopt a fatalist attitude along the lines of "I'll get the job I'm meant to get," you'll be a calmer, happier job seeker. This attitude doesn't come naturally to me, but it works wonders when I have less control over a situation than I would like. I believe I got the job I was meant to get and I believe we hired the person who was meant to have this job.

2. Small mistakes are remarked on, but don't weigh particularly heavy in the decision. I was always terrified that one misplaced comma or missing period was enough to disqualify me from a job. It's not true. We considered people who didn't send cover letters. We interviewed a person whose clothes didn't even rise to the standard of business casual, much less appropriate interview apparel, but that did not ultimately enter into the hiring decision. We brought in one person whose resume was too long by pretty much any guideline and one whose resume was probably too short by some guidelines. We noticed those things but it was experience and "fit" that were the deciding factors.

One of the reasons that I think we all get caught up on the small things during a job search is because we sense that point 1 is true. If there's so little that we can control, we want to control the things we can. My advice is to take that energy and put it into your cover letter. There were at least two times when we were about to reject someone based on the lack of experience in the resume when someone noticed something in the cover letter that seemed to indicate that experience might be there after all. So give yourself that second opportunity to make all your relevant experience available to the search committee by crafting your cover letter so that it addresses how your experience applies to the job description.

3. Enthusiasm. I'm not quite sure how to describe "fit" in any way that's useful, but I am convinced that enthusiasm is a piece of it. As a search committee, we want to see enthusiasm for the job, the people, the place, the organization, and the collection and enthusiasm for learning new things about all of that. If your real reason for applying for this job is that the cost of living is lower in St. Louis, that's probably not an enthusiasm that's going to get you the job--although, you can certainly mention it (it compliments our good sense in living here). I'm sure the same applies if your applying for a job in southern California and all you talk about is the weather. Find some other things to be excited about, too.

Good luck to anyone who is engaged in the search process now.     #    (2) comments

2007-01-12

The best news

This region is celebrating tonight. A missing child, Ben Ownby, from earlier this week was found with a missing child (now a young man), Shawn Hornbeck, who had been gone for over four years. They were found in the suburb where I live which is weird. Pictures of both boys saturated the area. I'm not good with faces and could have picked out Shawn Hornbeck in a crowd in the months after he went missing, so it's astounding that he could be kept hidden for that long.     #    (0) comments

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