October, 2006

During the Technology Training in a 2.0 World session, I had the pleasure of meeting Michael Porter of OCLC, Brenda Hough of Northeast Kansas Library System, and Dale Musselman of WebJunction. Brenda was one of the first folks I contacted after joining MaintainIT and she's been extremely helpful in offering information about what's needed to help libraries maintain a good level of service in public computing

Brenda stated that technical training needs to focus more on broad concepts to prepare staff to meet a variety of challenges rather than specific technology-based skills. Here are Brenda's tips for technology training that works:

I'm just back from Monterey, and the Internet Librarian conference, where we kicked off our "Share Your PAC Story" campaign. Steering Committee members Adam Wright, Helene Blowers and I met for lunch and had an energetic discussion about the project.

I was delighted that the conference had a track devoted to Public Libraries' Futures.

Helene gave a terrific presentation during the session on the Public Library 2.0: Emerging Technologies & Changing Roles describing the Learning 2.0 program for staff development at the Charlotte & Mecklenburg County library. Structured like a "summer reading program for our staff," the program encourages all staff members to play with social computing tools through a series of self-paced activities. Staff who complete all the lessons get an MP3 player. For more info on this terrific program, see Learning 2.0