One area the Corporate Librarian’s interested in is using technology to train people remotely. Vendors use web conferencing and webinar tools like Centra or WebEx all the time, and it seems a natural for the Corporate Librarian to do the same given the fact that most of his clients are in different offices entirely.
Many vendors are working on making their products more user-friendly and customizable, but the Corporate Librarian thinks walk-throughs are would also be useful in dispelling the “fear of the unknown” factor. Also, it would give the Corporate Librarian a chance to flex those bibliographic instruction skills he picked up in library school. It wouldn’t hurt to build an awareness of librarians as capable of doing more than just lit searches and putting together PowerPoint decks, too.
Any tips, in terms of what does and doesn’t work?
December 1, 2006 at 2:08 am |
cut the jargon:) always a good idea
December 3, 2006 at 6:32 pm |
I’ve done some screencasts using Camtasia. The feedback I’ve gotten has been ok. Just ok. We also have enterprise IM and I’ve done one-on-one training using that. Our training and development folks have used MeetingPlace to do whole classes but the library hasn’t taken advantage of that yet.
December 11, 2006 at 6:52 pm |
[...] The Corporate Librarian wants to stretch his information literacy muscles at his company and is wondering what works and what doesn’t. I highly recommend screencasting – it was pretty effective when I tried it to teach people how to check out barcoded books. Then again, I had to print out the screens for several of them anyway, so maybe not so much. [...]
June 6, 2007 at 4:20 pm |
ReadyTalk has a great solution for training people remotely. It is cross platform (MAC, PC, Unix) and also supports all browsers. This is important because you never know what kind of computer your remote user is going to be using. You can check them out at http://www.readytalk.com and they also offer a free 30 day trial.