Help others help themselves

Whew--back from a long and restful holiday, and ready to get back in the swing of things! As the new year begets new ideas, I'd like to share this burgeoning idea from Matt Beckstrom, of Lewis and Clark Library in Helena, Montana.

In an earlier post, I shared Ruidoso Public Library's program of engendering confidence and knowledge, so that staff can learn and help themselves, rather than relying on one person for support. In the same vein, Matt Beckstrom dreams of using technology to meet this goal. He recently shared his ideas with us:

"Right now I manage things on email and phone calls. For example, yesterday, someone reported that one of the public computers wasn't printing and emailed me. So I emailed them back saying, 'reboot the computer.' They did, and it worked fine. But as our organization grows, and as the number of computers that I support grow, I need to start looking at a task management system that helps keep myself organized, and also helps me manage the calls... and helps my users--my staff--and the patrons help themselves a little bit.

The one thing about this task management system I like [he likes OneOrZero] is that once someone opens up a call, like, 'the computer won't print,' I can respond back with the answer of, 'reboot the computer.' And then when I do that, I can publish that task into a built in FAQ. So when a user goes in there two months from now when another computer stops printing, they can go in and do a search of the archived calls first. Before they contact me, they can check and see, 'Oh, I can reboot it first.' Hopefully I can push off some of the calls by them helping themselves a little bit, and ultimately that would make the end user happy--our actual borrower, our patron--because it would fix the problem faster. And for all libraries, that's hopefully our goal: to make the customer happy."

The OneOrZero system Matt spoke of doesn't quite yet have all the bells and whistles his library needs, and, as he said, "I don't have the ability or the know-how to make it do that," but I hope he stays in touch and lets us know what he ends up using--he's on the right track, for sure!

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