LearnRT’s “TEDx, Boot Camps, and Unconferences: Innovative and Low-Cost Staff Development Events” offered insights on using nontraditional methods to help library staff gain knowledge and insight to better perform their jobs.
Janie Hermann, program librarian at Princeton (N.J.) Public Library, described how the library created a camp experience for its staff development day in 2009.
Money was the impetus: After several staff members were granted the opportunity to have training outside the library, the staff development budget had only $500 left. The library also wanted to allow for active and shared learning, introduce new web tools, and provide a new experience for staff.
Camp PPL “took the unconference format and applied it to a traditional staff development day,” Hermann said. She started by inviting all staff to submit ideas and volunteer to facilitate sessions, give a lightning talk, or work on the day in some other way. Next, she set up a Zoomerang poll for staff to vote on sessions and discussion topics.
The day itself featured lightning talks on a variety of topics (including one on wikis that used paper visual aids, rather than PowerPoint, to drive home the point that technology didn’t need to be a barrier to participation) and “birds-of-a-feather” sessions, where participants selected from a number of discussion groups to participate in. One of those sessions, where the group brainstormed ideas of what the library might do if money were no object, led to almost immediate results.
The library had recently moved into a new building much larger than its old one, and the new, multilevel facility was breaking connections among staff. The idea of five-minute morning meetings to reconnect emerged from that session, and remains in effect to this day. “I don’t know if we would have discovered that quite so soon or quite the way we discovered it,” without this informal discussion, Hermann said.
LIS Wiki has list of similar events that can serve as examples to libraries interested in implementing their own library camp.
Also at the session, Tim Daniels of LYRASIS told how, while he was with the Georgia Public Library Service, he implemented a boot camp for library technology staffs around the state to gather and share knowledge. This boot camp gathered 70 people at a state park for a weekend, which supported the immersive experience by making it difficult for people to pop out for a few hours. “I think that’s what we were going for,” he said.
The weekend’s format featured a few short (30-minute) planned programs, with organic conversations in between that were open to anyone to speak who wanted to.
While the program’s budget might be more than most libraries can devote (hosting 70 people at the park for the weekend cost $20,000), Daniels suggested that individual libraries could accomplish a similar program on a smaller scale by using local facilities.
Hermann also spoke about hosting TEDx programs, aimed at the public, at the library. Princeton was a test case for TEDx, but its experiences have led to a special TEDx Library license. See the TEDx site for details.