 Hello and welcome. Thank you for joining us for today's TechSoup for Libraries webinar, Technology Skills for Library Staff, Effective and Engaging Training Programs. My name is Crystal and I'll be your host. In just a minute we'll be joined by two guests for today who will share some of the successful staff training that they've been offering. Because technology changes so rapidly it can be difficult to keep our staff up to speed. So our panelists will share examples of how they've developed fun and engaging training for staff. But before we begin I have just a few brief announcements to share. We'll be using the ReadyTalk platform for our meeting today and please use the chat in the lower left corner to send questions and comments to the presenters. We will be tracking your questions throughout the webinar and we'll answer them at the designated Q&A sections during the webinar. All of your chat comments will only come to the presenters, but if you have comments or ideas to share we will forward them back out to the entire group as best we can. You do not need to raise your hand to ask a question, simply type it into the chat box. Should you get disconnected during the webinar you can reconnect using the same link in your confirmation email. You should be hearing the conference audio through your computer speakers, but if your audio connection is unclear you can dial in using the phone number in your confirmation email or that we've shared in the chat. If you're having any technical issues please send us a chat message and we'll try to assist you. This webinar is being recorded and will be archived on the TechSoup website. If you're called away from the webinar or if you have connection issues you can watch a full recording later. You will receive an archive email within about two days that will include a link to the recording, the PowerPoint slides, and any additional links or resources shared during today's session. If you're tweeting this webinar please use the hashtag T-S-4-L-I-B-S. We have someone from TechSoup live tweeting this event so please join us in the conversation there. TechSoup is dedicated to serving the world's nonprofit organizations and libraries. TechSoup was founded in 1987 with a global network of partners. We connect libraries and nonprofits to technology, resources, and support so that you can operate at your full potential more effectively deliver programs and services and better achieve your missions. TechSoup has helped to distribute over 14 million software and hardware donations to date through our product donation program. We offer a wide range of software, hardware, and services including software like Microsoft's Office and refurbished computers. For more information about TechSoup product donations and to learn about technology donations of interest to libraries, please visit techsoup.org and click on Get Products and Services or visit techsoup.org-libraries. All right, so we have two guests joining us today. Diana Loughlin joins us from Estes Park, Colorado where she is the tech guide at the Estes Valley Library. Diana will be telling us about their competency-based training program to help make staff become more tech savvy. Rachel Schmidt joins us from Sunnydale, California where she is the Adult Services Librarian at the Sunnydale Public Library. And she's going to tell us about the Tech Ninja program they developed to create an inclusive and self-paced learning experience for all library staff. My name is Crystal Schimpf and I'll be your host for today's webinar. Assisting us with chat and with Twitter we have Ginny Meese and Susan Bard from the TechSoup team. We'll be on Twitter using the at TechSoup for Libs handle and the hashtag TS4LIDS so we hope to see you there. Now we will have time for questions throughout the webinar so please send us your questions using the chat as they arise and we'll address as many as we're able to. If you ask a question that we're not able to address during the webinar we will follow up later via email with a response. Now this webinar again is being recorded and all of the slides, resources, and materials will be included in the archive of this webinar which you will receive in about two days. Now we'd like to know a little bit about you as well and what brought you to the webinar today so we're just going to do a few quick polls. So this first one we'd like to know our staff in your library or nonprofit if you're joining from a nonprofit today are your staff excited to learn about technology and try to think of the staff as a whole and what you can do is select one of these buttons and then click submit and then you'll be taken to the results and your result will be shared with us and you'll be able to see what everybody else is saying as well. I'm going to give you a few seconds for this and I know this can maybe be hard to assess. Some of you might have rather large staff so we're just looking kind of at the big picture here. Are your library staff excited about learning new technology or learning about technology? All right so it looks like we have about 3 fourths of everybody has submitted a response so I'm going to give you just a few more seconds and I'll close the poll in 3, 2, and 1. I'm going to close this now. All right and it looks like there's a pretty clear majority here that some are and some aren't so we have a real mix amongst our staff. I'm happy to see that about 14% of you say that yes staff are enthusiastic and excited about learning new technology and I know that for some of us that may not be the case but that people are really resistant to learning about technology. So hopefully in the stories that we hear today you'll get some ideas for how to increase that enthusiasm or maybe capture that enthusiasm if it already exists. All right so let's do one more poll here. Now this one, we're curious what library technology topics would be most needed for staff training in your library. And you can just select one of these. Which one of these would be most needed for staff training in your library? We do have another option here. You'll see that the options that we gave you really relate to the library resources and of course there are so many different technology topics out there we couldn't list them all but we thought well maybe let's start with these library topics that are most important, the library resources catalog, that sort of thing. So let us know which of these is most needed for staff training in your library. And I know it might take a few seconds to think about this. And of course if you're putting in other we'll see it in the chat. It's nice for us to see that. And seeing definitely things about the e-book, not just e-books but e-book readers coming through in the chat, office software, the desktop computer technology itself. Of course supporting people on their devices is a big concern. And then also talking about some of the internal library systems, ILS, that sort of thing, integrated library systems that people have that they need to learn in order to work in the library. Those are important technology tools as well aren't they? Things about coding and robotics. All right well seeing lots and lots of responses coming in in the chat, that's great to see. And also seeing that most of the poll is really slowing down at this point. So I'm going to close it in just a few seconds here. I'm seeing things coming in in the chat also mentioning upgrades to new software like Office 365 for example. So yeah definitely lots of things to be worried about when it comes to staff training. So I'm going to close the poll now in 3, 2, and 1. Close that. A few of you got your answers in right at the last second here. We have a clear lead with library e-resources. So those are the different digital resources, subscription databases, other tools that the library offers that you really want your patrons to be able to know about them of course, but also that means that staff needs to know how they work. And there are so many of those so I can understand that. Also e-books and public computer software got kind of a tie there. So definitely a big need there. All right, well thank you for sharing in these polls what your biggest concern was, and also kind of what your general status is in your library as far as technology training. And this is really just to set up our panelists today. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to hand things over to Diana. And she is going, again Diana is joining us from the Estes Valley Library which is in Colorado. And she is going to tell us how she has helped, and her library has helped bring staff from Tech Chi to Tech Savvy. So Diana? Thank you so much Crystal. And it's so great to be here with all of you today. So I'm Diana Lachlan. I'm the Tech Guide at the Estes Valley Library. And I'm actually only 20 hours a week here at the library. I was hired two years ago. And for the first six months of my position, my only responsibility was to train the library staff in technology. Now I offer Tech classes to the public, book library and sessions, and I train our new staff. So we are a one branch library serving the town of Estes Park, Colorado and outlying communities. A few things that make our community unique were overall a retirement community. So about 50% of the people who live here are over the age of 50. And we could be defined as a very well educated community and also a well traveled community. This means that our library, the adult programs are very popular and our community values lifelong learning. I'll tell you a little bit about our staff. We have about 25 people on staff. Of course it varies by one or two people from time to time. And our teams include admin, circulation, technical services, adult services, youth services. And we use substitutes who cover the shifts on our desk in the event that one of our circ team members is not available. And every single person on our staff participated in our tech training. And this came about because our library director wanted to increase the tech literacy of our staff before offering programs to increase the tech literacy of our community. So we created a formal training process for the staff to learn technical competencies. And this included preparing for a tech final assessment that the staff completed at the end of the six months of training so that we would have a way to measure each staff member's tech skill level. Here's the skills that we focused on in our staff tech training. Youth services, connecting mobile devices to the library's Wi-Fi, setting up the AV in our meeting rooms, which includes a projector and airplay for connecting Apple devices. Just some basic file management, you know, managing pictures and files on our staff share server. And using copiers and printers both for the public and for things that the staff do with copying and creating flyers and things like that. So as we started this tech training process, people were afraid. You know, the message the staff was hearing was kind of like, you have to learn these tech skills to keep your job. Well, that was true, but we were also giving the staff so many opportunities to learn and grow their skills over time that success was attainable. I started with a one-to-one meeting with each staff member so I could introduce myself and ask what kind of tech skills were important to them, ask what they wanted to learn, find out what their colleague needed to help with. And then we started by having each member of the staff fill out a self-evaluation on their tech skills. Then the first phase of our tech training was based on what people almost wanted help with. So especially at the beginning, I did things like just sit in the staff lunchroom and get to know people. And I tried to keep asking, you know, how can I help you do your job better? Because that was really my role, not to be some scary tech learning enforcer. And we could take it slow. We had six months to complete our tech training. And I told the staff that they don't need to know the answers to our customers' questions right off the top of their head. You know, what we were asking them to do instead was just to start by trying to figure out what the customer's question or issue was, and then look for a resource that might help them. If they're not successful in that process, then of course they can pass on the question to our technical services staff. So it's just like any reference interview where we would say, I'm not sure the answer to your question, but let's look for an answer together. So during most of our trainings, I would try to provide as much hands-on learning as possible. So oftentimes I would sit back and I would let our staff read through step-by-step instructions for what they were learning, and take turns with hands-on on the devices. This is kind of a silly picture. We have a tech scavenger hunt once a year that the staff get into a team and have matching bandanas, and have to go all over the library and complete different tasks together. So I'm not quite sure why she's holding a cow in the picture, but there you have it. So anyways, back to our six months of training. So the group trainings, typically I'd have two to six staff members attend at a time, so it was small groups, which was great for learning. And these group trainings weren't actually required. They were all optional. Instead the staff might choose to meet with me one-to-one for extra help, or they might choose to go to our staff website to get some resources where I had step-by-step instructions. And the idea was the staff could learn these skills any way they like. They are responsible for their learning in a way that works best for them. So I'll give you some specific examples of how I train the staff on connecting a mobile device to our library's Wi-Fi. And I'm sure this is going to sound familiar to many of you who are listening. So in order to connect a mobile device to our library Wi-Fi, the customer has to agree to terms of service which pop up in an Internet browser. Of course on older devices the Internet browser won't pop up automatically, or it pops up and people ignore it, or people don't know to scroll all the way down to the bottom of that pop-up where they need to push a button to agree. So in order to keep this training relevant for our staff, I showed the staff exactly how all of those common ways that our customers get stuck so that they would know how to help. In our group trainings I would demonstrate how to connect a number of different mobile devices to Wi-Fi, like iPad, Kindle Fire, Android Tablet, iPhone, and some of those were older devices. So the staff had to learn, okay, I open Safari or whatever the Internet browser is on the device in order to get the terms of service to pop up. And then I made this learning available in multiple formats. So I also had step-by-step directions on our staff website about how to connect to our Wi-Fi and all these common issues that come up with it. Then finally on the final assessment that staff completed, one of the tasks is a technical reference interview where I was pretending to be a library customer who was skipping the step of agreeing to the terms of the Wi-Fi and just trying to go right to my email on my mobile device. So staff had to troubleshoot through that common situation with me. Now of course, anytime we're asking people to learn new skills and to add additional responsibilities to their positions, of course there's going to be some resistance to that. Resistance is normal. And the way it looked for the staff at my library was a question that would come up and I actually never heard the question directly but I would hear it through the grapevine. And I think it was a good question. The question was why do we have to learn how to do the tech services job? Well the answer was you don't. So we were asking the staff to learn how to use all the tools that a customer can use at our library but we weren't asking them to learn the skills that the staff do. So for example, we wanted all the staff to be comfortable checking out and downloading an e-book to a mobile device. However, they didn't have to learn how to install the app for the e-book on five different kinds of devices. That was the responsibility for the tech services staff only. We wanted all of our staff to learn how to log onto and print from a public computer but they didn't have to learn how to manage the print queue. Does that make sense? I think it's an important distinction. And the other way that I noticed some resistance was I just needed to remind the staff to practice these skills. It's not enough to come to a group training and try a skill once and have it work and be like, okay, I've got it. You know, they won't really have it the next time the situation comes up especially when it comes up with a customer when they have a line of a dozen more customers waiting at the desk. So I got to say annoying teacher things like I noticed that the people who practice did the best on their midterm. That just seemed to help to remind people to practice. And I kept reminding the staff that the goal of all of this training and all of these extra responsibilities and learning that we're taking on is just to help us feel more confident in helping patrons and to help us support the tech literate community. It helped to keep these trainings as light and as fun as we could. I don't know about at your library. Strangely, I noticed that costumes are actually a motivating factor for the staff at my library. So I had a lot of success with like borrowing costumes from youth services, letting the staff dress up in a goofy way and take a picture of themselves with the green screen. I don't know why, but they loved it. And I wanted to point out in this picture, there's a woman in the center of the picture with her bandana on her head and she's wearing a pretty necklace and a purple shirt. That's actually our library director. So every single one of our staff participated in our tech training. And here's our library director on the yellow bandana team at our Tech Scavenger hunt. I think that was a great model for our staff to follow. So it was important to our library director to have a quantitative way to assess the staff's tech skills. She really wanted to see that after making this big investment in our staff, you know, six months of training, hiring me as a 20 hour per week position just to train the staff, she wanted to see some outcomes from that and see that our staff had learned our list of tech competencies. So we created a midterm and a final assessment to measure the staff's tech skills. And those were done as one to one appointments with me. So staff met with me one to one. The midterm took about 30 minutes. The final took about an hour. And with both assessments, the staff received a list of tech tasks that they needed to complete. And then I was just their shadow following them around as they completed those tasks. And in order to help me evaluate how they were doing, I created some really clear scoring. So the score that they received on each task of their assessment was based on how much time it took the staff member to complete the task, and also if they needed any hints or help from me while they were completing the task. They were welcome to bring any resources that they wanted so they could bring handouts or look up things on the website or have the step-by-step instructions with them. And all of that didn't change their score at all because that's how it is in real life, right? When we get a question, we have our resources available to help answer that question. By the way, Crystal is going to make these resources available to you. So you'll get an archive email after this webinar and included in that is going to be a link where I've made the midterm, the final assessment, the scoring, also our list of tech competencies available. And you'll also see the handouts from all of the tech classes that I offer to the public. So please feel free to look through that information and adapt it for use at your library. So with this scoring system in place for their assessments, the staff earned a score of an A through F on each of the tasks. And they really had to earn their scores. I was definitely holding them accountable. And that's why I have this quote about someone I overheard saying how proud she was of her B. So we decided that an 80% or better was required for their score on a final assessment. And three of our staff members had to retake their final assessment because they got D's or F's on it. Out of those, two of them ended up getting A's when they retook the final assessment. So it appeared the final assessment was that final nudge and motivating factor that they needed to be successful. And I will tell you that actually one member of our staff retired as a result of this tech training. And that was really sad. That was really hard for our staff. This process absolutely was challenging at times for our staff. I was asking them to learn new tech skills during some of the busiest times of our year. But I found that they absolutely rose to the occasion. Now we're seeing that our staff feel more confident helping our customers with tech questions that our customers' needs are being met more efficiently because now more often the first person they ask is able to help them. Our tech services staff is grateful for this training process because they're finding that they can better focus on their responsibilities and they're not getting as many calls for help from our staff. So with an average score of 90% on the final assessment, we can conclude, yes, our staff is tech literate. Of course, that's not the end. I continue to take new staff members through a similar process to get them up to board up to speed after they started with us. And we maintain the skills by having an annual tech scavenger hunt for the staff, which as you can see from our pictures is a lot of fun. They get to go all around the library doing different tech skills including dressing up in costumes in front of our green screen. So thank you so much for listening. Please send in your questions so I can try to help you understand and think about how to bring a program like this to your library. And Crystal, thanks for having me today. Great. Well, Diana, thank you for sharing this training program that you've put together. And certainly you've given us a lot of detail and I'm sure everybody's looking forward to taking a look at the resources that you've been so willing to share. We have had a few questions come in and you can continue to send your questions in and we'll get to as many as we can. And we have a few minutes for questions right now. And one area that I want to ask a couple of questions, Diana, is just getting at the staff and how you were able to allow the staff time. The first question is can you just repeat how many employees you have at the library? Great. We have 25 employees who all participated in this training. Great. And you mentioned that there were substitutes that also got to participate? They did. So we use substitutes on our service desk who help when the circulation staff are unavailable for their shift. And they participated too. And were those librarians or library assistants or mixed? Our library is kind of unique in that we actually don't have a lot of people who have completed their masters and who we would call librarians. So actually the majority of our staff we could classify as library assistants. They're bringing other kinds of talents to our team. Great. And then this question about time. So was the training done during work hours and was the library still open during that time? I know you said you did it in some smaller teams. So how did that work? Great. That's a great question. And I see a lot of those questions here in the chat right now. So when we did the Tech Scavenger hunt, that was pretty much the only time when every single member of our staff was required to be in the same room at the same time. And so we accomplished that when the library was closed. We closed the library two days out of the year for staff development. So the team was kind enough to give me a few hours during one of those days. All the other trainings happened pretty much while the library was open by me reserving one of our meeting rooms for us to use. And I would hold like with the group trainings I would offer each one at least three different times so that it would be more available to different people based on their schedules, based on their shifts. It was absolutely paid time for everyone. So in the case of someone who works on our service desk, they don't really have many hours beyond their on-desk time. So they were able to get from their supervisor's permission to spend extra additional hours to their normal schedule in order to fit in this tech training. Great. And then as far as the practice, I'm not sure you quite got to that part. So when people were working on individual practice, did they have to ask for time for that? Was it during their work day? How did that work? That's a great question. So it was during their work day. And if it wasn't possible for them to fit in that time because they're always on the desk or we have so many other responsibilities, they were allowed to have extra time. So come in a little earlier, leave a little later, and they were encouraged to spend that time even if it's by themselves just spending an hour to go into the meeting room and practice connecting a computer to the projector. They were encouraged to spend that extra time in their schedule so that they could accomplish this training. Great. Now we did have some specific interest in the scavenger hunt. And the first question is in the resources that you'll be sharing out in the archive on that resource page. Do you have an example of one of the scavenger hunts or is that something you'd be able to share with the audience? That's such a great question. I actually don't think I have the scavenger hunt listed at this time. Oh, I do actually. Okay, so I just checked the link. And yes, I have the scavenger hunt tasks available. So when you get this archive email link you will see the tasks that our staff got for the scavenger hunt. Great question. I'm glad that I stopped to share that with you. Great. And we are getting a whole lot of new questions coming in. We have about one more minute right now before we're going to move on and hear from Rachel. But I just want to let everybody know that if you've still got questions we'll follow up. We might have time before the end of the webinar, but if not we will follow up with you via email later on. So just to let you know if you've still got questions keep sending them in. But one more question about that scavenger hunt which is really, you know, was the goal of the scavenger hunt to kind of familiarize staff with what was out there, or was it to give them a practice opportunity? What was the purpose of the scavenger hunt in your mind? Great. I feel like the purpose was maintenance to maintain the skills that they had learned. A lot of the tasks were repeating things that they had already done, but maybe giving it a new shift, making it more fun, like adding costumes, like adding stuffed animals. So the idea was we've completed the six months of training, everyone's passed their final assessment. But of course we need to keep practicing. We need to get you back into the meeting room. We need to get you with an iPad in your hands again. So maintenance, but then adding some more fun and throwing in a few new things as well. Great. Well, it sounds like people really had a good time with the training. And you know, despite one person not sticking with the library afterwards, it seems like the majority really enjoyed it and that it was a very fun and engaging training. So thank you for sharing it with us. Thank you for having me today. Great. And we'll see. We might have some time for some more questions for Diana at the end, but I know we want to also hear from Rachel. So at this point I'm going to hand things over to Rachel just to remind you she's joining us from the Sunnyvale Public Library in California, and she's going to tell us about the self-paced Tech Ninja training which they implemented for their library staff. Rachel? Hi everyone. So excited to be here with you all virtually. And I just wanted to start with sort of a description of our library here in Sunnyvale. We're located probably about 30 minutes, 40 minutes drive from San Francisco in between San Jose and San Francisco. So we are in the heart of Silicon Valley. We have one library in the city of Sunnyvale, and it's a very big library. Our city is about 147,000 people, and we have about 55,000 people coming through the library every month over a million checkouts a year. So that's just sort of a picture of our library. So I have a few questions for you, and obviously I won't be able to hear your answer, but I think your answers will be yes. The first one is do you want to see your library management team do something embarrassing? I'm going to just say that you'd say yes. So in this picture you see one of our library administrators, Patrick Sweeney, doing a sing-along. He's playing this song, The Load by the Band. So that song that goes take a load off of me, take a load for free. It was great. Basically the staff got to see him do that and sing along with him. On the right we have Sue Kaplan who's one of our children's supervising librarians. And she did the best, very entertaining, silent performance of green eggs and ham. And that was like a great picture of her face. My second question is, does your staff training need a recharge? And I think most of you will probably say yes. This is actually a picture of my puppy and one of my best friends after a long weekend camping. And we were pooped out as you can tell. So check out our staff in Sunnyvale. It's a very large staff. We have anywhere from 35 to 65 staff members in the building at all times. I said we're a pretty large library. So what we wanted, we had a few goals with this Tech Ninja training. We wanted to get everyone on the same page with our customer service. So when you walk into the library many patrons have the same questions. How do I find eBooks? How do I sign up for 3D printing? How do I access my account online? They're all very similar questions. And we wanted to make sure that staff in every department felt comfortable answering these questions. Maybe not helping people download the eBooks kind of as Diana was talking, there's a difference. But we want our staff to feel comfortable with pointing them to the resources and just being aware of the resources that we do have. And so what we did was we created a 7-week Tech Ninja training. And the training consisted of answering these, you know, showing people how to access these frequently asked questions. So like I said, you know, examining the OPEC. Where do you find eBooks? Where do I find this on the webpage? Things like that. And when we took this to the management team originally, we asked how can we, you know, give the staff prizes for this all-staff training? Is there a fund we can touch? Can we have a piece of party? And the library management staff said there isn't a fund. So we had to get extremely creative. And what we did was we asked the management team if they would share a little piece of themselves with the staff if they all completed these goals. And so when I said that the management team were going to do embarrassing things, they really weren't embarrassing. But they did go out on a limb and share a piece of themselves. So Patrick did play on his guitar. Sue did do a Green Eggs and Ham. My boss, Christine Mendoza, played Love is an Open Door from Frozen on Her Flute. And our director at the time, Lisa, made brownies if we completed all these goals. And so this was an all-mandatory team challenge. Everyone had to participate. And what we did was each week you had to go to this website that we all created. It was three librarians that got together to kind of make this training exist. So if you visit sllibrary.wordpress.com you can check out all of our challenges. And basically I just want to read to you a little description of how we sort of started. So this kind of gives you the feel of what this ninja training is all about. Welcome, young ninjas. You are embarking on a tech journey. Here are the steps. You found this site. Yay. Each week look for a new mission to complete. Each mission has three tasks and an optional bonus. You are not alone. Ask anyone for help. Upon completion click on the mission's name and leave a reply. In that reply you say Mission Accomplished. We are all working together to win prizes donated by the managers. Master the tasks, log your comments, and watch the ninja meter rise. Together we will all become ninja masters. So that's sort of the style in which we took. It was extremely fun coming up with this language. I think I definitely looked at 80's Nintendo games for like sort of Legend of Zelda style for these descriptions. But we wanted to make it fun. We wanted to make it very accessible for staff. And all staff was able, was granted free time to do this on a weekly basis. So we did seven ninja skills. And each week over seven weeks they would have to do three tasks. And at the end of those three tasks they would complete their missions. So that's kind of how it worked. And we set up laptops all over the library if some staff weren't able to access the computer so that it was very accessible. We checked in with all staff to make sure that they were really trying to complete the task. And they felt comfortable and we would, all the librarian mentors would walk around and make sure that they were comfortable with these tasks. So these were the topics that we did cover. Like I said, we went over OPEC, how to find stuff. We used Discover and Go which is a museum passes service. And all these things are sort of hidden in our website. Library websites are not the best things. And ours definitely is not. And it's pretty hard to find certain things. And so just even showing staff the quick way of accessing things is really important. And so I'll give you an example of one of the tasks that we did do. So the DVD car rolls out. Customers are hovering and waiting for their moment to pounce. And I'm sure you guys have this at your library too. A guy walks up to the desk and asks, how do I find what the newest movies are? And then on our site, actually this is our OPEC. This is a picture. We actually, we create a link for all of our new arrivals which that large arrow is pointing to. And that's a very hot link. I mean that link is really helpful for all of the librarians for sure, but staff and people that want new movies are all over that link. But our circulation staff doesn't necessarily use that. So we wanted to make sure that people realize that that is a quick way of getting the information. Another example is everyone wants to know about eBooks. And they know when they walk up to our information desk. By the way, our information desk is Combined Circulation and Librarian Desk. So it's a reference circulation desk. And so when people walk up, they're not sure they're talking to a librarian or whoever. And so they might just say, I want to know how to get free eBooks. And most of the staff pre this training just handed it off to a librarian. But what we wanted was people to just be able to show where to access these things on our website. So it was more of a clean handoff. And so this is just a picture of someone. Wanting eBooks, and we just did a sample test. Like, you plan on traveling to a warm tropical destination once this whole ninja thing is over. How will you use the catalog to build a virtual list of items you'd like to read on the beach? And then hint, you must find and add the items to your cart. And we're just giving people tips on how to find those and how to help patrons find them as well. And our circulation staff actually answers a lot of the phone questions too. So that helps them when they're talking to someone and patrons about accessing things through their account online. So yeah, that's another example that we use for our tasks. And then our last task was would you like fries with that? The art of upselling. So once all staff were able to find and navigate to these resources and perhaps also show patrons how to do that, how do they share that information with the staff? So we really wanted, just like when you walk into a Starbucks when they try to offer you a muffin or whatever, we wanted our library staff to be able and feel comfortable doing that as well. So when someone says, oh, here's your library card. You can also access Consumer Reports. And we have a 3D printer which you can sign up through this way. So I think that in the end, we had a pretty high participation. We did get Lisa's brownies at the end which is great. We accomplished all the missions. But what we really did is we bonded together as a staff. So this was like, I've been here almost 5 years. And this was the first all staff training that I had participated in. And probably like a lot of your libraries, you're going through an influx right now where there are a lot of new staff members coming in. People are retiring. And so we've been hiring like crazy. And it's just what we really needed was a fun way to bond with staff in a library way. And so that's kind of what we did do. So yeah, that's about it. Great. Well Rachel, thank you for sharing your Tech Ninja training program, your library's Tech Ninja training program. And interesting because it's a very different style of going about the training than what Diana shared with us, but still obviously very effective and very fun. And we've had a few questions come in and we have time for that now. And I'll just let everybody in the audience know if you have any questions you would like to send in, there's plenty of time for you to do that now. We'll get to as many as we can before our time is up today. Rachel, one of the questions that has come up so far also relates to time, but really relates to the time it took you and your team to create the online Ninja challenge. So how much time did it take? And was it easy or was it difficult? It was extremely fun. If you go and check that out, we definitely, I think the fun part was trying to create this lingo of whatever Tech Ninja versus Legend of Zelda is, whatever. But I don't think it took too much time. I would say maybe from 3 librarians worked on it together from different departments. And we probably spent a total overall 3 hours each maybe. And that includes our meetings because the tasks are not terribly hard. If you go and check it out, there are things that we talk about every day in the library. So it was pretty easiest for us to come up with these things. And then there's the website part which maybe took a little extra time. But we've done WordPress a lot here, so we're pretty comfortable with using it. Yeah, yeah. Now speaking of the website, just want to clarify. So on that website are we able to see all of the 7 challenges that you had? You are. WordPress is a little weird in that it shows the 7th first because it's sequential, so it will just show the last one first. If you scroll down you should be able to see every mission that we did do. Great. And just again to remind everybody listening in that we will share that link in the archive which you will receive by the end of the week. So if you didn't snag that URL then we'll get that to you soon enough and you can go take a look there. So another question that's coming up is, was there any resistance to this being mandatory? And I'm sure you have many different job classifications, so was there any resistance there? And if so, how did you handle that? Well, I mean our mandatory was kind of mandatory. So yes, everyone was in theory supposed to do these things. Now did everyone do it? Probably 80% did. And actually we as the team that led this tried to encourage our librarians, fellow librarians, colleagues to participate. And they were the least to participate and same with the management team. So we actually had a really high participation rate amongst the staff that we wanted to really connect with as far as circulation, our tech services, people that are on the desk, but maybe have never had the okay to answer these reference style questions when they're really informational based questions. So it's sort of a shift in the way our library was thinking as well. So basically I mean I would have hoped to have more participation from the librarians here, but it was a little lower than I thought I guess. And in terms of participation, it sounds like you kind of handled this in a way where you wanted it to be mandatory. It sounds like there wasn't really any consequence, is that right, for not completing it. Now was there an assignment? So how did you see if staff had actually participated? What was their end product? So if you visit the webpage, each week they had three tasks and they had to complete those in theory. We never knew for sure if they did them, but at the end of completing those they would leave a comment with their name on the WordPress blog saying Mission Accomplished with their name. So in that way that's how we knew that they completed the task or the mission for the week. And you mentioned that some people worked together on this. How did that work? Or did you hear how people were using that collaborative effort? Well we set up sort of laptops over in circulation because the majority of their computers are used for working, checking in materials. And so we would see people sort of trying to enter these tasks together and then librarians would also go in and sort of walk around. I mean these weren't scheduled so they didn't have to do them at a certain time. You just basically had to do it by the end of the week, but we saw a large collaboration amongst the staff as they were talking about how to complete these things. So amongst circulation staff for example they'll have some people that are just a lot more techie than some other ones. So they would work together to complete those tasks together. It does to me, and if it doesn't to those of you listening please send us more questions. We still got some time and we're making our way through the questions as we go. So another question similar to the collaboration, but did anybody approach you or the other creators of this training for help? Did anybody come to you and say, you know, I'm having difficulty with this question? Oh definitely. Yeah we sort of called ourselves Ninja Masters and we were just like, okay please. And I did my best on a weekly basis to sort of drum up the excitement because I think this could be a boring thing, but if you talk about it and you say, I mean if you check out our tasks you'll see that they're quite funny and you know it could be a fun training. So what I would do is sort of walk around and you know at the beginning of the week say, oh we posted the things and let's go check it out and let me know if you just sort of making sure that people knew that if they needed to ask a question that we were all there to answer. Great. Now one more kind of serious question just about the way you planned this all out. Did you have any formal evaluation or is it just the anecdotal feedback you've been getting so far? No formal evaluation. And do you think you'll do something similar to this again? I think so. We're actually, we're in the works right now of getting a new website. So I was just talking about, and I do think, I mean I think this worked well, but I think in the next stage I might go a little bit more along the lines of Diana's because hers seems more interactive and I want to sort of force people to be interactive not just on a computer. So you know I love Diana's approach. I don't think at the time we had that much time to spend dedicated to that, but once you get a new website we may, we're going to need that kind of training. So I'm pretty excited about working on that. Great, great. Well I have one more question for you Rachel, and then I think we'll bring Diana back on the line and have a few questions for both of you before we sign off. But you know we got a question Rachel about the style of this training, and somebody says it's fun and maybe a bit outrageous. And does that style match the corporate culture or the culture of your library or did you have to kind of stretch or push the organization in that direction? And the person who wrote this says, I love what you did, but I'm in an academic library so no one has done anything off the grid. So tell us a little bit about the style of this training. I definitely think, like I said, I had not seen any kind of training at all since I had been here, especially as like an all staff level. And so I think we wanted, as the training team got together, we wanted to definitely be extremely lighthearted because they think that there were areas of sensitivity among staff, especially with tech issues. And so we wanted to be very lighthearted. And the culture here sort of hadn't been that, but I think this sort of brought in a lightheartedness that we really needed, and we pitched it really well. So I think actually this was a step in a new direction of culture. Does that make sense? That does. And it's actually interesting to hear that because I think in watching it you think, oh gosh, this library does all this fun stuff. And so it's really interesting to hear that this was a new step in that direction for you to do something more fun and engaging. And that you saw that as a way to engage people on a very difficult topic. So I'm glad you shared that with us and thanks to the person who asked that question. And actually that leads us to a question I wanted to bring Diana in on this one. And maybe Diana if you're there we'll have you take this one first, which is we've had a few questions now about the resistance or people participating. And one person asked, do you think that age was at all a factor in the acceptance or resistance to this training? Or did that not really seem to be the issue? So Diana, do you have anything on that note? That's such a good question. I probably can say that yes, I interacted with, I'd say two members of our staff who are kind of what everyone has in their mind right now. Someone who's a few years away from retirement has done enough to keep their tech skills up to date but doesn't exactly reach out and embrace all the new technologies that are coming to us these days. So yes, I definitely worked with a few people that I think would fit that category. But I also found that it varied. I noticed a couple of our younger staff members who you think would be really tech savvy and I'm sure that they are at home in their personal lives. I almost saw from them this kind of like, oh, I'm sure I can figure this all out. I don't have to come to training. I don't have to come to practice. I can usually just figure things out and that's how I'll do my final assessment. And some of them didn't do as well on their final assessment because it really does help to practice these skills. Yeah, and Rachel, what about you? Did you have any issues related to age or that you could speak to? I wouldn't say age. I would say the division amongst departments from the past. So I think since we're such a large library that each department does what they do and they do it well but there's not a lot of cross. So when someone walks up to the circulation they're like, we do this and they do that. And that's the thing we were trying to fight. And that's the thing, sorry, it seems like crazy, but that's the thing we were trying to sort of break down I guess I should say because we wanted like a comfort level. And so I wouldn't say it was age at all. It was just maybe the culture from before and then what we were trying to bring in is what we were kind of working with and dealing with. I'd like to add one thing I noticed in terms of departments that Rachel mentioned. I think I saw the same thing you did which was the participation was most challenging with the tech services staff most ironically because we were trying to help them and also with management just because they're so busy. They have so many responsibilities. So those are the ones I had to follow up with I feel like more often just to make sure they were scheduling their assessments and throwing the time frames they needed to and that sort of thing. Well thank you so much for sharing both the answers to these questions. I know they weren't all easy questions to answer but also just clearly we can see that you both put together very well thought out programs and that you gave a lot of care to the way that you work with the people in your libraries to help them develop these new technology skills. I know there are some questions we weren't able to get to but we will follow up with those of you via emails. We did not answer your question. You'll be hearing from us soon. But right now it is time for us to wrap up. So I'll just remind you that you will get an archive email within a few days that will include all of the information from this webinar, the PowerPoint, the recording and also the links to each of the resource pages so you'll be able to access those on your own. I do have just a few announcements so if you'll stay on the line and then we'll have just a very brief survey at the end where you'll be able to tell us what you thought of today's webinar. But a couple of announcements you might be interested in. First of all, if you're interested in a product called GrantStation, this is a very special product from TechSoup that is on a discounted one-year membership and today is the last day for that so we wanted to make sure you know it is $99. It's a $600 discount off the retail price and you can get that through today at techsoup.org-grantstation. We'll put that link in the chat. Also, we have several upcoming webinars. Two that might be of interest is next week on Wednesday. We have one about a product called Silk that can help bring your organization's story to life through data visualization so that's pretty interesting. And then our next library's webinar will be on February 17th and we will have guests from the DPLA, Digital Public Library of America, sharing resources for getting started with digitization and you can find that on the TechSoup webinar page and also view archives of past webinars there. I am happy to share with you that the TechSoup for Libraries webpage recently got a new look so check it out if you haven't been there in a while. TechSoup for Libraries is a division that addresses the specific technology needs for public libraries and we collect and share stories from public libraries about utilizing technology and we share them via webinars and blogs, etc. So visit us at TechSoupforLibraries.org to share your story and read stories from others that have been shared. Again, just one more brief moment. We'll share a survey with you at the end but I just would again like to thank Diana and Rachel for sharing their training programs today. Thanks, ReadyTalk for being our sponsor and of course thank you for joining us today and hearing what we had to say. Have a great afternoon everybody.