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

[Tara Robertson]

Dan said:

> 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.
>

When I did training with SITKA, we learned from the first few sites that
giving library staff access to a training server and telling them to "play
around" didn't result in staff spending time practising using the system. We
then developed worksheets where staff would have to do various tasks like:
register a patron, check out 3 books, mark one lost, observe the change in
bills, etc. We found that structured exercises worked better for most
library staff than just telling them to "play". (I'm not sure what, if
anything, this says about the kind of folks who work in libraries, or how
people in libraries learn how to use software, but...) Perhaps if the SITKA
folks are still using these types of exercises they might be willing to
share them?

I've also found this to be a useful way to teach other types of software,
like Zotero, and Excel.

Cheers,
Tara
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://libmail.georgialibraries.org/pipermail/open-ils-general/attachments/20100615/ee14cde4/attachment.htm