There are 170 employees at CRS with a variety of skills and abilities. Some are incredibly technically proficient, while others are limited in what technology they use or feel comfortable using. Who can train staff on things that others take for granted?
Peer training began four years inspired by a similar program at National Geographic. In 2 years the program has grown to, 62 classes with an average attendance of 15. Over 40 employees have participated as speakers or instructors.
Types of sessions:
- •Tips and tricks for existing resources
- •Introduction to research tools
- •Introduction to tech concepts
- •Conference and trip highlights
Managing the program:
- •Core group – They meet quarterly to plan the next three months – topics and speakers. Use discussion boards in SharePoint to help with planning and reduce email traffic. They recruit new hires to help. New employees can get better known by doing these.
- •SharePoint – It is a repository of documents, discussions, etc. They use the free version. One benefit is that handouts are available for reuse.
- •Standard operating procedures help to lessen administrative burden
- •SurveyMonkey is also used for participant feedback
Benefits:
- •Increase digital literacy
- •No financial costs
- •Minimal administrative burden
- •Accessible documentation
- •Share conference knowledge
While there are a number of challenges, they recommend that others try it.
Challenges:
- •Finding time in addition to daily work
- •Cancellations
- •Recruiting new presenters
- •Not integrated with staff development plans
- •Pressure to expand
![[Post to Twitter]](http://informationknot.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-twitter.png){kind=icon}
- Start small: Use a test case with a group of people who already work together. Don’t use a group who works in silos and never share information.
- Find a manager who support collaboration and who is willing to spread your vision throughout the upper ranks of management
- If someone does not want to participate remember that you can not make them.
- Provide one-on-one training for people who want to use the wiki. Make sure they know they are free to use it whenever they want
- Choose a wiki tool that is easy to implement to start. The point is to show people how the tool can improve efficiencies in their daily work lives.
- Facilitate autonomous user updates in each information silo to help free up roadblocks and get people used to updating the wiki. Teach groups to own the wiki by contributing to it.
- Create a “resources” page in your wiki that contains frequently needed information for the group.
Twitter is quickly becoming a tool that businesses use for marketing and PR. For example, real estate agents love Twitter to list new houses. Here is a real estate agent in Phoenix, AZ. @tmh_phoenix. Southwest Airlines even has a personal PR employee whose job is to monitor their Twitter feed and respond and listen to conversations about the company. Follow Southwest @southwestair. So how do you monitor whether or not people are talking about you or your company. That’s easy. Go to Twitter Search and type in your company name or Twitter user name. The results will show tweets that mention you and offer a great opportunity to join a conversation. It’s also a good technique to use to see who has retweeted your posts. The more retweets you get, the better you are able to determine what content your followers find interesting.
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Capitol Words is an interesting new tool from the Sunlight Foundation. The presentation of reminds me a little of Wordle which is a good thing. It’s nice to see government information in an easy to asborb format. On Capitol Words users can view an image map or tag cloud of the top words of the day, week, month or year used in Congress. It’s very captivating and a quick way to see the topic trend over a period of time
As you might imagine, “budget” has been the most popular word in recent weeks. There is also an option to view by most vocal lawmaker by a specified period of time. Richard Durbin (D-IL) is the most vocal member of the past 60 days.
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]]>URL shortening services are experiencing a renaissance in the age of Twitter. When every character counts, these services reduce long URLs to tiny forms. But which is the best to use, when so many are offered and new ones seem to appear each day? Below, issues to consider and a breakdown of popular services, including recommendations and services to avoid (the new DiggBar being one of these).
The URL Shortener Mega Chart
To make recommendations, I reviewed various services and how they stacked up in a variety of features. All this got dumped into a spreadsheet, below. You can also view it in full-screen here.
Each column represents a feature. Want to know more about that feature and why it is important? Each is explained below the chart. Green indicates that a particular service gets a good grade for that feature. Red indicates that it is lacking. Not all features are of equal importance, however, so don’t let the occasional red mark make you think a service is lacking. But in general, the more green, the better.
This speech pulls together Pew Internet Project data about how people’s use of the internet and cell phones has fundamentally changed the “information ecosystem” in 10 ways. Lee discusses how this has changed the role of libraries in the digital age and he points out ways that libraries can adapt to meet the expectations and demands of patrons.
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