Category: Original Content

Editor’s Note: This is part one of a two-part guest post on survey use in libraries by Celia Emmelhainz. Surveys are everywhere. You go to a government website, a vendor’s blog, an organization’s page, or step into a building: “We just want a few minutes of your time.” A scattering of survey requests linger in my email: ACRL, RDA, data librarians, IndieGoGo, four campus programs, the International Librarians’ Network, Thompson Reuters, and Elsevier. And that’s just the past month! Then, when you try to actually open a survey, there are tiny little buttons: you have a large screen, but you can’t manage to hit any of them. There are pages and pages of Likert scales. Do they want your life’s story, told in rankings of five items and slider bars? They definitely want you to brainstorm for them, but who has time to think of the top 15 libraries in…

Editor’s Note: This is part two of a two-part guest post on survey use in libraries by Celia Emmelhainz. Learning the Craft of Surveys Learn the craft. Survey-building is a craft, so study up on survey design. Luckily for you, there’s a free Coursera course on Questionnaire Design that started on June 1, 2015. I can attest that the lectures are useful. Don’t be afraid to start small and develop more nuanced surveys over time. You’ll learn what sorts of questions and approaches actually work for you. Consider representative, quota, or cluster sampling rather than trying to get responses from everyone. Don’t know what that is? Take Solid Science: Research Methods for free on Coursera, starting this August 31, 2015. It’s well worth it for library research.

Tell us about your library job.  What do you love most about it? I am an Undergraduate Experience Librarian at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Richard J. Daley Library where I focus on how the library can support the academic success of our undergraduates. It’s hard to pick a single thing I love about my job because it is really personal to me. As an alumna, serving UIC undergrads is like stepping back into my own undergraduate experience and constantly thinking about ways I can improve that of our current students. Collaboration is key to many of our library efforts and my current role at UIC Library allows me to meet campus partners with the same mission. It doesn’t hurt that I work with an inspiring team of librarians that constantly push me to be the best professional I can be. Where do you see yourself going from here?…

I recently participated in a training session about empathy, led by our wonderful Staff Development Specialist here at the Martin County Library System. The goal of this session was to define empathy and discuss how to show empathy for our patrons and co-workers. It got me thinking about empathy in regards to teaching technology. I frequently work with library patrons who are frustrated with technology. Many of these patrons are older adults who feel handicapped because they were not raised in the digital age. I, on the other hand, was born born in the digital age. I learned how to use a computer in elementary school and technology has been present in my life ever since. It’s easy to forget this advantage and lose patience when you are teaching someone with a different background. In teaching classes and offering one-on-one technology help, I’ve picked up a few tips about how…

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Justin M. White. A post by the net librarian was making the rounds on Tumblr a while back and caught my eye. It was short, so I’ll quote most of it here: As a public librarian, a lot of my job is writing. Copy for websites, computer class handouts, signage, etc. It’s critical that librarians know what language patrons understand. Unfortunately a lot of tech stuff doesn’t use accessible language. There’s a copier in one of the libraries I work at which has an error message that pops up often which says “insert key counter”. I’m sure this is precise and accurate language to the programmer who wrote the error message, but it really doesn’t mean anything. After trial and error it means you forgot to put money in, so the copier won’t work. But how is the average patron supposed to…

Unix, the ancient operating system that powered mainframe computers in the 1970’s, couldn’t have been easy to design. Computers of that era were unbelievably expensive and slow compared to what we have today, and this put extreme limitations on the software that they could run. Programs had to take up as little disk space and system memory as possible because there just wasn’t much to go around. With that in mind, the original Unix programmers focused on writing tiny programs that 1) had one functional focus, and 2) played nicely with other programs. The reasoning behind this was that small, simple, single-purpose programs would be easier to improve than large, complex, multi-purpose ones, and if a user didn’t like the way one program worked they could swap it out for a different one (as opposed to being stuck with one mediocre way to do things). In practice, programs would be…