UKlibchat

Last night for the first time in ages I managed to catch #uklibchat, usually I join #chartershipchat, as I have just submitted my chartership, but I fancied a change. Uklibchat is a twitter conversation between library professionals, we met roughly once a month. Last nights session was really good. We discussed the definition of users, who are the users. For me it's a closed group, the staff and students that are at the college. An easy one to start with.

Customer service and barriers to delivering this. Coming from a retail background customer service is back ending a shift exhausted having helping everyone else. Maybe that is a bit extreme, but customer service is about putting the customer first, stopping that conversation and dealing with the customer. Personally I hate to ask where something else in a shop and if I then get a rude person telling me I am likely not to bother buying the product. Good customer care is shared, you normally tell someone about it. Working in education where students have to pay a massive amount to attend, someone recently told me students are paying £35 per day to attend, so give them what they deserve.

Barriers to providing good customer care- staff personality, work load and not being able to give students what they want due to budget or conflicting strategy plans of the department. I have to say reading success at the enquiry desk by Tim Owen, dated by very good for training sessions.  I must have used this book twice, maybe three sessions.

Online users experience, a decent website needs to have the content written by the librarian, a web designer to make everything pretty and a web developer to make it actually work. Technology not working, due to IT issues is one of my biggest problems when teaching students. Luckily I have a decent relationship with the IT department and they are use to no body ever saying something works well.

Thing 5- Reflective practice

As I had my PDR (Professional development review) last week, which is all about reflection, I thought this topic woould be good to start. I suppose it's not until you stop and think that you realise how much you've achieved and how much you've learnt.

12 months ago it felt link there was a massive void in my knowledge on things like social networking, and not I'm pretty good at twitter, even explained what it was to someone the other day. With CDP, I seem to have found my love of twitter again.

As September is almost here and I will be leading on the LRC inductions, it's time to reflect previous years, what went well and what needs to be improved. Having no training/ advice on how to set up an induction, I created a one hour talk, tour and task session. Which seemed to go really well, the tour was a bit of a lull, but it provided students with a chance to see the whole of the LRC and what it has to offer them. But I did feel a little strange walking in to the quiet study room, saying "this is the quiet study room" a bit like an estate agent. The only issue I had was with the IT, either the laptops lost wifi connection, the system would crash on the LMS only has 10 licences, so getting 20 students online, while still having the self service machine up and running as well as two members of staff working was always going to be tricky. So instead of running around trying to fix three IT issues at once, this year I will be doing a 30 minute induction, which will be talk, tour and informal wander around. The latter part will also be helped by another member of my team, so the students get to know more than one person.

Overall I am pretty pleased with the inductions and the students enjoy it too, NSS results are (for the third year running) very good for the LRC. Long may in continue.

thing 4

Started to use Twitter and RSS feed not sure I actually like the RSS feed idea, but I don't thinkg I have got my head around it just yet.

Love Twitter and have done for quiet a while, I like the idea of make a short and sweet statement about what I'm up to rather than typing a massive paragraph.