However, as much as teaching has revealed itself to be a good thing that I actually enjoy doing, I've made my peace with leadership to an even greater extent -- albeit in a much more subtle way. Here is the story of how I, improbably, became a leader.
I have a job at the Odegaard Undergraduate Library that involves mainly checking out books and processing reserves, and I have struggled to make use of my LIS skills while still working within the bounds of my job description. A few years (!) after starting at the iSchool, I was able to start two projects that fulfilled both conditions -- and were also fun and fulfilling: creating a weblog to use for staff communication, and co-instituting a training day for student workers.
The blog was prompted by a Public Services Forum on blogs, wikis, and instant messaging I attended in 2005, after which the head of the library, Jill McKinstry, asked me to look into creating a blog for internal use by OUGL staff.
I set up a blog for Odegaard on LiveJournal, and gave a presentation about it at a staff meeting -- my first at Odegaard. I got 16 people to sign up for it, and people posted about topics as varied as CatsInSinks.com to the Undergraduate Library Research Award to whether dogs are allowed in the library. I accomplished this by thinking of myself as a sort of cheerleader. I visited people at their desks and helped them sign up for accounts. I posted entries asking for feedback - at one point, several of us posted about our first experiences with Web technology. When people made comments, I commented in return to keep conversations going. Here's a screenshot:
When Danielle Miller King became Access Services Manager at OUGL the following year, she encouraged me to rethink the blog. We decided to use Wordpress, to host the blog on Odegaard's internal Access Services page, and to use a generic login that would make the site accessible only to OUGL employees. To get things going, I recruited help from the lead student workers in the Computer Commons when doing the initial installation, to help get my tech skills up to speed. I chose a couple of coworkers to help me select themes, and then asked the rest of staff which they preferred. I took on a similar "cheerleading" sort of role as I did the first time around to encourage participation. This proved to be a recipe for success, as the blog is still in use today, and served as an example for OUGL's Admin and Reference departments when they set up their own blogs.
Our student workers have used the blog. Staff from other libraries who work on our desk have used it. Mysteries have been solved and news has been communicated via the blog. I keep up on tagging the entries, updating the software, responding when the blog is down, and answering questions about how the blog should be used, and I enjoy this small administrative position. It's been redesigned, implemented in a new Access Services home page design via RSS, and been overseen by different AS managers -- and still the blog is there. It appears that most, if not all, staff are comfortable blogging, and that it's now a regular part of our work communication. I look forward to visiting Odegaard in twenty years, after I return from one of my many trips around the world, and seeing the blog still in action. Okay, maybe not 20 years...maybe ten.
First, funding. It's expensive to have twenty staff members get paid for three hours of work when the library isn't even open for Fall Quarter yet. We wrote up a formal proposal and had our supervisor present it to the director of the library. The answer came back yes! We spent the rest of the summer working with our colleague who had previously done all the training, translating her content into Powerpoint slides and group hands-on activities. She had been working off a checklist which we took as our goal sheet: it contained a comprehensive list of all the tasks the students would need to know. We also consulted the student manual and Millennium (our circulation software) manuals. Another method we used that I think contributed to our success was involving the current students, and doing a lot of testing. We checked with students to see how closely they followed the written procedures, and got ideas for best practices from them. Quite often the procedures were correct, but there were subtle tweaks the students had come up with to streamline processes.
I knew right away I wanted there to be a scavenger hunt - a huge empty library after hours just begs for the kinds of games you can't play when it's teeming with patrons. You can read about the plan for the scavenger hunt in the Teaching section. Oh, and of course there would be snacks.
The most difficult part was -- and you'll see in the Teaching section that this was a concern of mine there as well -- timing. We had no precedent for how long it'd take them all to figure out how to check in a book or complete the game. Also, Cleo's 11-month appointment had her out of the office for much of our planning time, so we put in some odd hours and did some of the last-minute scrambling a month early...only to do it all over again .We had five additional staff members step up to help us do the lecturing, and when I divided up all the topics we had to cover, I found that we had....five to ten minutes each. Ten minutes to introduce them to Library of Congress Classification. Five minutes to tell them everything about hold shelves. And no time at all to show the new students how to do a pickup, or actually shelve a cart, or how to inventory the stacks.
Here's the schedule:
As you can see, an added twist was that we wanted to separate the students into "returning" and "new" groups, and teach the returning students about their new task: working the checkout desk. And then get them all back together to do the scavenger hunt together. And, would they all stand around mutely eating, the old hands ignoring the new kids, during the break? Would they have to leave at 8pm sharp, not having finished the scavenger hunt, thinking it was a lame game with no point and still not having found the secret books we planted in the stacks?
Well, let me tell you: nothing bad happened at all. We started out five minutes behind schedule and finished exactly on time, each group munching the candy they'd found at the end of the hunt. All the staff stuck around chatting rather than going home immediately. It was amazing to me that it was so successful and I am proud of it -- although the proof won't come until the next few weeks, when we get a sense of how much the students have retained and how much further training they'll need.
My boss, Ryan McCrory, evaluated Training Day as follows: "You have given the department a solid foundation from which to build a continually evolving training program that not only accomplishes the obvious task of training our student staff, but also helps to build a real sense of camaraderie and team amongst the rest of Access Services." Which really, finally, makes me feel like I deserve to call myself a leader. But only when the project is right!
Finally, here is a comment from someone really important: one of the students:
---------- Forwarded message ----------Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2008 11:54:33 -0700 (PDT)
From: xxxxx xxx
To: Christine
Subject: Training day
Hi Christine,
I didn't get a chance to say this yesterday, but I thought that you and the other staff did a great job with training day. Getting to talk to everyone, and seeing all the library people in one room at the same time (!), was fun and insightful. I definitely feel more comfortable about working at the info desk, and I'm sure that the new people feel the same way about their jobs as well.
Thanks for helping us students out, and I think you should consider making this an annual tradition.
Click here for other embarrassing good things people said about Training Day.