A Passion For 'Puters

Soaring As The New Supervisor On The Block
Alice B. Ruleman

Alice gave some excellent tips for new supervisors, including keeping track of what you can control (knowing your management style, caring – and learning about – your employees, expressing expectations, learning policies & procedures), what the challenges you will face are (amount of training you get, feeling intimidated, not having enough time, feeling alone, being overwhelmed and stressed out) and things that you need to know (how things are done and what the formal and informal routines are). She gave some tips on self-training; study your job description, learn routine activities, let employees help you, look for training opportunities, learn less routine items were all mentioned. She also gave us tips and tricks to help us find our feet as new supervisors:
* Be yourself
* You set the tone for the day
* Start slow
* Be respectful
* Be visible
* Emphasize teamwork
* Be fair and consistent
* Be a good communicator
* Provide training
* Make your own decisions
* Admit when you are wrong
* It’s a process!
We then went from tips & tricks into a discussion of leadership styles. She had us take a Leadership Styles Quiz (pdf) and then we discussed what each leadership style meant. She finished by saying that the best supervisor combines all 3 leadership styles, depending on the situation and the employees.

Table Talk
Internet access & MORENet
This was pretty much worth the cost of admission, right here. I got an uninterrupted 15 minutes with Randy from MORENet to discuss *exactly* what our library needs to do to comply with MORENet’s requirements for offering Internet access wirelessly. I also got a great tip about how to do it properly (and freely) and will be putting that into place very, very soon! Yippee!!!

Meeting Without Meeting In Person
Tom Peters

Tom came to MLA to discuss the different kinds of meetings we hold in library-land, the number of meeting we hold and how to make them easier, cheaper and better. He identified 5 types of meetings:
* Face-to-Face
* Conference Call
* Video Conference
* Web-Based
* Virtual World-Based
and identified how often we meet. In a series of mathematical calculations (described in more detail in his slides he calculated that librarians convene 25 million meetings a year – and that the vast majority of them were face-to-face, with a few (23% or so) conference calls and less than 1% of each of the others. He also described doing some quick calculations during a face-to-face meeting that was dragging on about the expenditure of a couple of thousand dollars and concluded that the staff salaries alone made the meeting more expensive than whatever it was they were arguing over. His proposal was to move more meetings into the virtual space (and not by using conference calls, either, which he hates) so that people can multi-task, share rich information (documents, etc.) and be productive while meeting. He mentioned the use of social networking sites as a way to keep in touch in between meetings as well, a topic close to my heart, as you all know…
Check out his slides – they are packed with information and ideas on how to evaluate your current meetings and make ’em better. Also, check out his upcoming ALA Tech Source Tech Report for information on using virtual worlds as meeting “places”.

Three Low-Cost Usability Evaluation Methods For Library Website Redesign
Kim Thompson, Hsin-Liang Chen & Sanda Erdelez

This session went through 3 ways that the University of Missouri-Columbia folks conduct first-round usability testing on websites. The first method, Information Horizons, was one that they came up with themselves and was explained by Dr. Erdelez. The idea behind this method was to get users into a room with some paper and markers and have them draw out a mind-map sort of thing with themselves in the middle and the sources they would turn to for a particular information need branching out. Each successive “layer” of info sources would be in a different color. If your website doesn’t come up in the session naturally, you would bring it up yourself to see if they *ever* think of your site as an information provider. After discussing that, we went into paper prototyping (which I’ve discussed on this blog before and, since I have no Internet and I’m typing this up in Notepad, will ask you to search for because I can’t look up the URL of *where* I’d mentioned it before…) and Dr. Chen discussed his method that he uses to interactively create paper prototypes. He encourages his testing subjects to use paper “widgets” to lay out the page as they would like to see it, with their own labels and their own drawings if a widget isn’t available that suits them. Finally, Dr. Thompson discussed the idea of cognitive walk-throughs. This would happen before you bring in users to test out your paper prototypes – you envision a user, envision the steps that they would take to find the information and then use the prototype to see if there are any issues that come up during the execution of the task.
All 3 methods were interesting, pretty much free, and they looked quite useful!