Recently, I had the pleasure to speak with Maureen Sullivan as LLAMA‘s New Leader’s Representative. We talked about some of her upcoming projects as the incoming ALA President. It is sure shaping up to be an exciting year for her and ALA.
You can read our interview here in the 2012 May issue of LL&M. LL&M is LLAMA’s official journal.
Maureen Sullivan
April 2012 issue of College & Research Libraries News
My Job of a Lifetime interview came out in this month’s issue of College & Research Libraries News. I spoke with Erin Dorney about my job at K-State Libraries, and some of the projects I’m doing.
This post is written for Round 8 of the Library Day in the Life, a project started by Bobbi Newman, where librarians across the world share details of their daily activities. The is the 4th time I am participating. Here are my Round 5, Round 6 , and Round 7 blog posts.
I am the Research and Development Librarian at Kansas State University Libraries, and I work in the Office of Library Planning and Assessment.
8am: Statistics class. Probability theories today. Mostly gambling examples. *Took notes in preparation for ALA 2014 in Vegas.*
10am – 11am: Virtual reference. There is always a question 2 mins before the end of the shift.
Lunch with colleague at The Chef , one of my favorite eateries in Manhattan, KS. Had fun talking about some of our recent international travels.
Chicken Pot Pie for lunch @ The Chef
2pm – 3pm: Met with Director of HR on our big project this year – to redesign our library’s recruitment and retention strategies. We want to attract the best talents out there, but how are we going to do it? It’s going to be a fun and exciting project. It also helps that our university president has just made the hiring process a lot simpler. Plenty of good ideas today.
3pm -4pm: Worked on the upcoming Popular Culture Conference presentation (the instructional design of cooking shows). Watch cooking show clips. Yes, that’s research! Tried to get a handle on Prezi.
5pm: Swam.
6:30pm: Sushi dinner. Planned and grocery-shopped for a 3-course Mexican dinner for this weekend. Mmmm. Can’t wait!
9:30pm: Tried to read Stats textbook. Switched to Moneyball after 15mins. At least that’s about statistics too…
This post is written for Round 8 of the Library Day in the Life, a project started by Bobbi Newman, where librarians across the world share details of their daily activities. The is the 4th time I am participating. Here are my Round 5, Round 6 , and Round 7 blog posts.
I am the Research and Development Librarian at Kansas State University Libraries, and I work in the Office of Library Planning and Assessment.
Statistics class
The day began with an 8am statistics class…
I set aside a bit of time everyday just to read about everything and anything. Several articles today really interested me. One was this one about being a “connector”. And then there’s Malcolm Gladwell’s piece on the same topic from his book, The Tipping Point. There is an interesting “test” in his piece, so see how “connected” you are. I got about 50 points. Not nearly as high as some of the people he tested on. How “connected” are you?
I HAVE to talk about this: An article in the Guardian talks about being a 21st Century Librarian, and mentions the Library in the Day project!
Susan Cain_The Power of Introverts @ ALA Midwinter 2012
It seems that introverts are getting quite a bit of attention lately. (which is great, cause I am one, and we tend not to speak up that often!) When I was at ALA Midwinter, I attended a talk by Susan Cain, who has written a book on the power of introverts, called Quiet: the Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking. It was a very enjoyable session. Today, I read another blog post on the HBR blog called The Introvert’s Guide to Networking, with many good tips.
Can introverts be Connectors? I’d like to think so, especially with online social networking. What do you think?
Virtual reference between 10-11am, and then lunch at Coco Bolo’s. I’m trying to get in shape, but when two of my favorite desserts join forces, there could only be one outcome:
Creme Brulee Cheesecake
In the afternoon, I worked with our fantastic marketing, graphic design, and web design people on my undergraduate diversity internship project – a program that introduces academic librarianship as a career to undergraduates who can bring diversity to our profession. It is a project that is close to my heart and it’s almost 2 years in the making. We are planning to hire two interns for the 2012-2013 academic year. The interns will do much more than regular student workers (and get paid more). They will receive reference training and work at the Help Desk. They will work with librarians on special projects. The assignment of projects will be based on their interests and skill sets. They will have mentors to guide them and educate them on librarianship as a career. We are very close to being ready to promote it to the rest of the university. I am truly excited about this project and can’t wait to get it started!
4pm – Stats homework… (will do it tomorrow).
This post is written for Round 8 of the Library Day in the Life, a project started by Bobbi Newman, where librarians across the world share details of their daily activities. The is the 4th time I am participating. Here are my Round 5, Round 6 , and Round 7 blog posts.
I am the Research and Development Librarian at Kansas State University Libraries, and I work in the Office of Library Planning and Assessment.
Whenever I tell people my job title, I always feel the need to explain further. It is after all a very new position in the library world. In fact, part of my job is to actually define the position- to myself, to my library, and to my profession. In a nutshell, I “research” innovative things in and outside of the library world, and I “develop” new programs and services for my library based on those research. I think it’s a perfect library job for someone like me, who likes to be creative, who is curious about new things, and who has a bit of an entrepreneurial drive. However, as with most new things, it evolves constantly. Recently, a colleague in my department, our Service Quality Librarian, resigned. As a result, I am going to take over some of her projects. Many of them have to deal with assessment, which I have developed quite an interest in recently. I’m taking a statistics class, and a consumer evaluation class this semester, and both are highly relevant to these new responsibilities. So, while I’m saddened to see a colleague leave, I’m excited about the new directions of my position.
This morning, I read a Harvard Business Review blog post on Culturematic. It’s an interesting article on some of the really cool things libraries are doing to draw children in, to create a “magical” experience for them. I am intrigued by the culturematic concept, but I’m not quite sure if I really understand it yet. It’s now on my “To Explore” list.
I also worked on a paper/presentation proposal for IFLA 2012 this morning. I have always been intrigued by IFLA, but have never attended. This year, it’s going to be in Helsinki! I’ve been to Helsinki once when I was 17, and had a great time there, so I’d love to go again (especially after watching the above short film on Helsinki and libraries). I remember it being very clean.
For my job, it’s important for me to network with people from different libraries (and professions). So money permitting, I try to go to as many conferences as I can. Next week, I will be going to the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference in Albuquerque, NM, to co-present a paper on the instructional design of cooking shows. (In case you don’t know, I’m a foodie). I wrote a little about it in one of my blog posts. As librarians try to create engaging video tutorials, I think we can learn a thing or two from cooking shows, which are some of the most successful (and certainly popular) video tutorials today.
Break time during a 4hr Consumer Evaluation class
In the afternoon, I had a 4 hr Consumer Evaluation class. FOUR HOURS! But it’s amazing how time flew when you’re actually interested in the subject! I was so interested in it because I was recently put on a library Help Desk redesign project (one of my new job responsibilities as mentioned earlier). I kept thinking about how to apply consumer evaluation techniques to that project during class. I have so many ideas now. The most important thing I learned today – MUST have clear project and test objectives.
The class ended at almost 5pm. I went back to my office to check and reply some emails, and it’s time to go home.
The question is, what is the optimal, the best, the most perfect library tutorial we can make? For example, if we want to produce a video tutorial on how to use a database, should it be a comprehensive one that shows all the features of the database? Or should it be a something really concise and short? Or something in between? To answer that question, a sensory analysis story comes to mind.
Sensory analysis is the science of evoking, measuring, analyzing, and interpreting responses to products (which includes physical products, services, and information) using the five senses (sight, smell, sound, touch, and taste). It originated from food science and large corporations nowadays rely on sensory scientists to help them research and develop their products, anything from food, to shampoo, to the leather used in car seats. But what does sensory analysis have to do with making the perfect library tutorial?
Below is that really interesting sensory analysis story, told by Malcolm Gladwell (what a fantastic storyteller!) at a TED Talk (which was adapted from an article he wrote for The New Yorker). It may contain the answer to making the perfect tutorial.
Just as there is no such thing as the optimal Diet Pepsi, but optimal Diet Pepsis, perhaps there is no such thing as an optimal tutorial video, but optimal tutorial videos. If we segment our students by discipline and class for so many our services, why not make different tutorials for different market segments. Perhaps we could go even further than just segmentng them by discipline or class, but also by their study habit, personality, or ambition, e.g. ”A” students who want to study everything, last minute crammers (this would probably be the biggest segment), visual learners… etc. What this means is, we need to know our users. This is nothing new. We have been trying to do that for a while now. But are we knowing the right things about them?
To take a cue from sensory analysis, I would love to see us make multiple versions of a tutorial and see how our students feel about them. (If anything, it would give us a chance to really practice our video-making skills). We could even be outrageously inventive when we make these tutorials. As Howard Moskowitz has found out, people don’t know what they like if what they like doesn’t yet exist.
The idea of this Screenwriting for Librarians series of blog posts is to share some screenwriting, storytelling and filmmaking techniques that I think might help fellow librarians who are interested in utilizing this medium to attract more users.
Librarians who are interested in making video tutorials should really check out cooking shows, which are possibly the most widely watched video tutorials today. Cooking shows are mainstream instructional videos designed to teach viewers how to do something. But they must also be entertaining and visually appealing, so that even those who don’t cook would watch them. We should try to impart these qualities to library video tutorials.
Research has shown that web viewers have extremely short attention spans. Most don’t watch web videos in their entirety. I know I tend to skip or fast forward most video tutorials, simply because most are too long, too slow or simply not engaging enough. With that in mind, note the pacing and the rhythm of the Gordon Ramsay video below.
In under 40 seconds, he teaches us how to make a very delicious looking Pasta with Crab, Chili, and Lime. It utilizes montage (a series of short shots edited into a sequence to condense space, time, and information) to move the video at a frantic pace, with each cut lasting only about 1/2 second. So, in a 40 secs video, there are probably close to 80 cuts. You can’t afford to look away. You have to pay attention. There are roughly 18 steps to make the dish. The voice-over directions are concise and simple. We don’t need complete sentences. That just slows things down. The key information here is, the tutorial doesn’t have to happen in real time. No cooking show would make the viewer wait in real time for the food to be done. The same should apply to good video tutorials – trim all the unnecessary footage. I would much rather have a video that goes fast and the student has to rewind to re-watch portions of it, than a video that’s too slow and students miss information because they skip or not pay attention.
Nigella Lawson’s video below takes a very different approach to teach us how to make a similar pasta dish.
The video is longer and has a more leisurely pace, yet it engages, perhaps even more so than the faster paced video. Note how she assures us at the beginning that “this is so easy”. As she gives out the directions, she explains the reason for every step. It is truly a cooking lesson. She gives her personal opinions and she uses emotional language which humanizes the whole process. The images are gorgeous to look at. And even though the cuts are longer than the Gordon Ramsay video’s, there are still at least 3-4 cuts for each step of the cooking, which keeps the viewers from getting bored visually.
We naturally like to look at food, but we may not be that interested in looking at screencasts of databases. How do we make our tutorials visually interesting? It requires some creativity. For example, in a demo of a database search, you could pick a subject matter that is visually interesting, such as sports (or food!). There are plenty of royalty free images/videos/sound effects/music that you can find to edit into the video. Intercutting a keyword search on, let’s say Michael Jordon, with an image or a video clip of Jordon in action, combined with appropriate sounds, could make for a more engaging viewing. The same technique could be used in practically any subject, as along as you are willing to search for some interesting supplemental images/video clips/sounds (or produce your own) to incorporate into your video tutorial.
Yes, it takes time and efforts to make a good video tutorial. But think about how many hours an effective one will save you if you won’t have to spend 10, 15, 20 mins demonstrating the same thing in class in real time over and over again.
I’m currently the Assistant Chair of ALA New Members Round Table (NMRT)’s Liaison Coordination & Support Committee, and we looking to fill a number of liaison positions for the 2011-2012 year. Below is the message sent out to various listservs:
NOTE: We’re done with active recruiting for now, but if you learn of someone interested in volunteering as a liaison, let them contact Charlene (charlene.hsu.gross@gmail.com) directly.
Are you looking for a way to be more involved in the library profession? Being an NMRT Liaison is a fantastic opportunity if you are an NMRT member and a member of another library organization. NMRT liaisons play a key role in increasing awareness of information and ideas of mutual interest to NMRT and liaison unit members with a minimal time commitment. Liaison responsibilities are listed below. We have many spots left to fill, so if you see your organization on the list below, please consider volunteering! If you are interested in getting involved, please fill out the volunteer form: http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/
You can volunteer for more than one and will be assigned to no more than three units. Your assignment will be for one year, beginning at the close of ALA’s Annual conference through Annual Conference 2012. Conference attendance is not required.
Major Liaison Responsibilities
NMRT-L and unit communication tools (listservs, blogs, wikis, ALA Connect,etc.) as well as conference attendance are appropriate ways to carry out these responsibilities.
The responsibilities of the liaisons are to:
1. Join appropriate listservs, including NMRT-L. Monitor publications of the liaison unit.
2. Submit committee meeting dates and program information for their liaison unit. Request inclusion in the distribution of agenda and minutes for the unit. Publicize information concerning the unit including relevant program invitations, announcements and other information.
3. Keep their units informed of NMRT activities that would be of interest, such as the programs sponsored by the Student and Student Chapter Outreach Committee, the Student Reception, Mentoring, etc.
4. Invite unit representatives to attend functions including Orientation and the Student Reception.
5. Report on discussions, policies, and action of their units that are relevant to NMRT. Obtain minutes, if possible, and summarize relevant sections.
6. Report on discussions, policies, and actions of NMRT that are relevant to their unit.
7. Identify and alert NMRT of unit programs which NMRT may wish to co-sponsor, either from unit breakout sessions, listservs or other means.
Units in need of liaisons (as of August 25, 2011):
ACRL (Womens’ Studies Section) WSS
ACRL Western European Studies Section (WESS)
American Library Association (ALA) CPE
American Library Association (ALA) Membership Meetings
American Library Association-Allied Professional Association (ALA-APA)
Arizona Library Association
ARLIS/NA
Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE)
Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS) (2-3 1 more members)
Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC)
Association of Jewish Libraries
Association of Library Trustees, Advocates, Friends and Foundations (ALTAFF)
Black Caucus of the American Library Association (BCALA)
Canadian Library Association
Ethnic & Multicultural Information Exchange (EMIE) RT
Federal and Armed Forces RT
GLBT-RT
GODORT
Indiana Library Federation
Iowa Library Association
Joint Conference of Librarians of Color (JCLC)
Kansas Library Association
Learning RT (LRT)
Library Support Staff Interest RT
LITA
Map and Geography RT
Maryland Library Association
Mountain Plains Library Association
Nassau County Library Association
New York Library Association
North Carolina Library Association
OCLC
Office for Information Technology Policy Advisory Committee (OITP)
Social Responsibilities Round Table (SRRT)
South Carolina Library Association
South Dakota Library Association
Southeastern Library Association (SELA)
Special Libraries Association (SLA)
Staff Organizations RT
Video Round Table
Wyoming Library Association
This post is written for Round 7 of the Library Day in the Life, a project started by Bobbi Newman, where librarians across the world share details of their daily activities. The is the 3rd time I am participating. Here are my Round 5, and Round 6 blog posts.
I am the Research and Development Librarian at Kansas State University Libraries, and I work in the Office of Library Planning and Assessment.
KU/K-State Professional Development Workshop
An all-day (8:30am – 4:00pm) professional workshop today. About once or twice a year, Kansas State University Libraries and University of Kansas Libraries organize a professional development workshop together and invite other academic librarians in Kansas to join us. This year’s workshop is held at K-State’s Hale Library. Anne Zald and Jennifer Fabbi, librarians at UNLV, present a workshop featuring their work at UNLV with the UNLV Faculty Institute on Research-Based Learning for High Impact Classes. Undergraduate research is the hot topic in higher ed right now. In fact, I am in the process of compiling a report of what programs and services academic libraries are providing to support undergraduate research.
This post is written for Round 7 of the Library Day in the Life, a project started by Bobbi Newman, where librarians across the world share details of their daily activities. The is the 3rd time I am participating. Here are my Round 5, and Round 6 blog posts.
I am the Research and Development Librarian at Kansas State University Libraries, and I work in the Office of Library Planning and Assessment.
Morning - Check and reply emails. Literature review for a QR codes paper/presentation that I am working on with a colleague for the 2011 Brick and Click Library Sympoisum. Our session is called “Putting QR Codes to the Test”.
Afternoon - Two webinars back to back. The first one is on marketing Primo, the new discovery tool that my library will be using. And the 2nd one is an ALA TechSource Workshop called, Delivering Innovative Mobile Services through Your Library, presented by Meredith Farkas, Head of Instructional Services at Portland State University. We cheer when she uses our library’s “Ask a Librarian” page as one of her examples.
 My library's "Ask a Librarian" page was used as an example in the webinar |
Right after the ALA TechSource Workshop, we have a farewell party for our most wonderful colleague, Rachel Crocker, who will be leaving us to attend University of Denver’s graduate program in Peace Studies. 
 My colleague Rachel's farewell party |
follow: RSS