How do you maintain your public computers?
Librarians want to know.
Librarians want to know.
Last month, I asked libraries to share how they are supporting social computing, and we heard from Robin Hastings, the Information Technology Manager at the Missouri River Regional Library, who shared what she and her staff are doing at their library.
Soon after her comment to the blog, we spent some time chatting with Robin to learn more about the programs and projects she and her staff have cookin'. One particular project is a training program to train the staff how to answer questions patrons have about social networking sites:
"At about three-thirty, four o'clock every afternoon at our computer center, a good 80% of the computers are pointed toward MySpace. We just finished a year-long training program that introduced the entire staff of the library--but we were very encouraging to our public computer center staff to take this as well--to teach them how to use MySpace, how to answer the questions the patrons have, as well as quite a few other social networking sites.
We included general wikis, we talk about blogs and how to keep up with what's going on. The library has a couple of blogs, and so we show them speed readers and blogs, and basically we did the variation of the Charlotte and Mecklenburg Public Library Web 2.0 or Library Learning 2.0 program. We just added MySpace and a couple of other sites our patrons use frequently."
People learn by doing, and I just love these programs coming from Helene Blowers (one of our very talented Steering Committee members), PLCMC, and other libraries. Programs like 23 Things and Learning 2.0 are tremendous opportunities to get in there, learn, AND have fun!
Be sure to check out the MRRL learning blog. You'll find podcasts and posts on wikis, blogs, information on MySpace, tagging, and don't forget the incentives! What a creative and comprehensive program.
--> Here's my question: if you've organized programs like this, did any of the participants continue to blog or use the resources they learned about AFTER class was over?
Please share your answer in a comment!
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Tell us about your daily routine maintaining public computers, or a moment when you were particularly proud. Don't forget that what might be "that's nothing" to you may be an "aha!" to someone else!
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