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Category: Carleton

Choosing a Course Management System… The Saga Continues

Published by Iris on Monday, April 24th, 2006

Last term, six professors accepted the challenge to road-test Moodle and Sakai, the two finalists in our quest for a course management system. At the end of the term, each professor and many of their students took surveys. And now a group of IT people, Web department people, library people, and a faculty member are sorting through the survey results to see if they can give us some clues about which system would work best for our campus in the long term.

Unfortunately, after working for a week to analyze only about 55 survey results (ending at 2am last night, I might add), I’ve realized that our job is even bigger than it seemed at first. I’m not quite sure why I didn’t anticipate this, because I haven’t participated in any project yet that hasn’t become much more complex and labor-intensive than seemed possible at the outset. It turns out that we have to cope with several related issues. In addition to testing the functions of each system we are also:

  • comparing the two development communities,
  • analyzing survey responses that give us a lot of useful information but that do not actually answer the questions we asked,
  • charting current pedagogical trends,
  • Grappling with the vaguely-felt, ill-defined, but strongly-supported goals of a “Small Liberal Arts College,”
  • Choosing between at least two divergent ideologies of technological adoption,
  • and last but certainly not least, come up with evaluation criteria and apply those criteria in a way that will appease those who are completely committed to which ever system we decide against.

I am one of the lucky 4 members of this group of evaluators charged with doing the actual evaluation and choosing of the system… heaven help me. I’m not only choosing a system, but I’m also choosing which of two departments on campus I want to continue to interact with on friendly terms for the rest of my career.

If anyone had said that I’d be handed this type of project and responsibility less than one year after getting out of library school, I’d have laughed in their faces. But as it turns out, it seems that I’m pretty good at this committee thing, so I get assigned to a lot of them. If this keeps up I’ll morph from the library liaison to certain academic departments into the library liaison to campus committees.

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New Toys! (possibly)

Published by Iris on Friday, April 21st, 2006

I just got out of a two-hour brainstorming session with our web team, and WOW! We might be getting some new tools made specially for us (sometime in the next few years).

It all started at CIL 2006. Well, it started long before I started working here, but it had been back-burnered until last week when I mentioned that I’d like to explore the option of reorganizing our subject research guides to aid in resource discovery as well as resource location. I’d been inspired by Chad Boeninger’s Biz Wiki. He had everything that normally went into a subject page and more, and (and this was the kicker) it was all keyword searchable! Finally, a subject page that doesn’t require students to know what they’re looking for before they even start!

So last week at our department meeting I mentioned that I’d like to try the wiki thing, and suddenly everyone got very excited about transforming our research guides from glorified handouts into something more dynamic and useful. Then, the magic that can happen when you work with a knowledgeable, engaged, and explorative group of people began to happen. We wondered what we actually wanted this new thing to do, and this led to a suggestion to brainstorm with the campus web team about our ideal tool and see if they’d be able to build it for us. Then today we ran all of our disjointed goals and hopes and fears past the team, showed examples of web tools that do some of what we want, and talked through possible architectures, bits, pieces, metadata, and functions with people who do this sort of thing for a living. (They already developed the database-driven content management system that our college uses.)

So, here are some of what we said we want. We want the ability to:

  • collect URLs, web pages, etc when we see them in the course of the day, and save them somewhere were we can get back to them and describe them before publishing them.
  • have database URLs and uber-description blurbs in a central place so we don’t have to update multiple pages whenever databases change their location.
  • pull this database and other links into pages maintaining their uber-descriptions or changing the descriptions.
  • have pages keyword searchable or browsable by discipline or category
  • have easily modifiable metadata (which we’re calling “baby bibs”)
  • have the whole thing based on a relational database
  • have keyword searching return short “advice” pieces as well as lists of resources
  • be scalable, customizable, dynamic, yet controlled… think square circles.

Basically… a furl/evernote/wiki/blog/catalog. And wouldn’t RSS be nice? And what about user tagging?

After today, the librarians are going to analyze the existing guides to see what’s actually there and how we would explain to a computer program what we’d want, create profiles of possible uses and users and how they would need the tool to function, and get closer to a list of features and functions that we want.

SO EXCITING… so much work for the poor web team. I sure hope this pans out.

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Statistics: So much potential…

Published by Iris on Thursday, April 13th, 2006

I know I’m not the first librarian to wonder “just what can I quantify and graph that will come close to representing what I do in a day?”

Currently, as far as I know, the public services in our library collect statistics in many forms: usage statistics from most of our online databases, gate counts periodically throughout the school year, circulation statistics, number of questions answered every hour of every day at the reference desk, number and location of people in the reference area at different times in the day, number of classes taught and how many students we reach through those classes, and number and length of individual appointments and correspondences we have with students and faculty. These can all be graphed quite nicely.

Now here’s the rub: these things don’t actually measure the impact we’re having on our community. Unfortunately, “impact” is kind of subjective, and can often happen in unforeseen and invisible ways. So I’m lost. I’m having statistician’s block, I guess.

Besides, it’s too beautiful outside to think about statistics. I can’t believe I just wrote a whole post while sitting on my porch! I love spring.

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Visioning and Watching: Redux

Published by Iris on Wednesday, April 12th, 2006

I kind of hate to admit it, but this morning’s all-staff meeting was actually stimulating. This doesn’t mean that I think we should have them more frequently, of course, but today went exceptionally well. Now, there were moments… there always are when you get 30-ish people together in a room furnished with 28 or 29 chairs, food sitting there (like desert placed on the table before the main meal) waiting for “after the meeting,” and something as meaty as our organization’s direction for the next 10 years on the agenda. But I came out of the meeting realizing that I really have found my dream job. This organization values the future and the past just enough to experiment with the new, preserve the best of the old (collections and traditions alike), and build it into the conscious structure of the organization that each of us should be scanning the horizon for innovative tools, methods, and services (see my post on Our Vision and Watch List below).

One of the points that drew the most discussion this morning was the method by which we would watch those tools, methods, and services on our “Watch Lists,” and the staff at large didn’t even balk at my co-worker’s suggestion that we create and update an internal blog! It’s very refreshing to know that my department (made up primarily of late-20s and early-30s types) aren’t the tech-outliers in the library any more. It was also very refreshing to hear our director saying, “We’ve got a community of people here that know how to figure things out, find information about things, and teach things to other people, so take advantage of your co-workers.” This is the key to getting over Millennial Discomfort and continuing to do what librarians do best: providing timely and excellent information service.

I’ll be interested to see how this all plays out.

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