Re: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Costs/Staff training/testing

[Marla Ehlers]

Grand Rapids Public Library made all of it's training materials available via the Michigan Evergreen wiki when we went live:  http://mlc.lib.mi.us/wiki/index.php/Grand_Rapids_Public_Library_Training_Documents  These are actually more a users manual that we used as written support for formal training classes.  There's much more in them than can be covered in the training time we had, but they serve as a reference and, for those able to train themselves by reading the manual, more in-depth training docs. If you're interested in what classes we held and what we actually covered in those classes, look at http://mlc.lib.mi.us/wiki/index.php/Class_Contents  Staff were required to attend certain classes depending on their responsibilities and we spent roughly 6 weeks in training to get everyone through the classes they needed, holding 35 classes total for roughly 400 (no, our staff isn't that large, they just had to take multiple classes).  This was our third migration to a new system in just the years I had been with GRPL and we knew how important formal training that tapped all the various learning styles would be to the success of our project, especially with the (mis)perception of greater riskiness to the migration, given Evergreen's open source nature and all. As indicated on the index for them, these docs relied heavily on those created before them (the Evergreen community to the rescue once again!) and on our specific situation.  I'm afraid they haven't been updated since we went live 2 years ago, though we have a set internal to us that gets updated regularly as we learn more and upgrade the system.  This internal manual also includes exercises at the end of most sections, something that didn't get carried over into the MCLS set. Last I knew, the training barcodes still worked, if you have access to the Michigan Evergreen test server . . . Marla open-ils-general-requ...@list.georgialibraries.org wrote: Subject: Re: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Costs/Staff training/testing From: Jonathan Rochkind <jonat...@dnil.net> Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2010 18:56:15 -0400 To: Evergreen Discussion Group <open-ils-general@list.georgialibraries.org> To: Evergreen Discussion Group <open-ils-general@list.georgialibraries.org> If any of you all wanted to 'open source' your training curriculums, I bet that would be incredibly valuable. (It's not code, so it wouldnt' be 'open source', it would be more like "creative commons", but you know what i mean). On Jun 15, 2010, at 12:14 PM, Dan Scott wrote: On Tue, 2010-06-15 at 11:50 -0400, Cynthia Williamson wrote: Couldn't agree more re staff testing - our one "do-over" would be changes to the way we did staff testing/training.  In a past migration project at another library, when our vendor did the training months before we went live (we had no choice about timing), I knew staff wouldn't retain what they'd learned.  I created exercises for them to do on a weekly basis, they had to work together in pairs and they had to hand in their "homework".  In going a more casual, open source, learn-yourself way, my big under-estimation was staff engagement. They just weren't as excited about EG as Robert and I were.  We're lucky to be an academic library with a slower summer time so it all worked out for us.  And our circ desk is not crazy busy as some public libraries circ desks can be so that made the "learn while live" situation doable.  It all really means that, in spite of some universal truths, you have to make your plan according to your own situation. Its not a one size fits all situation, many things can be done differently depending on how much time & money you have and depending on the skill levels and engagement of your staff. Cynthia To add one more voice to the mix; during the months leading up to our go-live date, our cataloguers had weekly training / exercise sessions where each week we went over the previous week's tasks and then introduced some new tasks with practice exercises. When we went live, they were in a relatively happy state. Kudos to Ron Slater, who put together the training schedule, and the cataloguers for tackling it with good spirits and humour. In contrast, our circulation desk is very short-staffed, so the staff had very little time to commit to formal training sessions of this nature. It was also a little bit harder coming up with good representative samples of problems they would encounter; setting up the system with dummy data was a lot of work (this would be a good part of a test & training package, if someone wants to develop that!). When we went live, they were very unhappy because they were trying to learn how to solve problems on the fly - and that is not a fun thing to do in front of users. I think we would all like a do-over on that one. --