When County Librarian Anne Cain supported Library Human Resources Manager Janet Hildebrand and Cheryl’s proposal to have every one of the nearly 300 staff members working in the system’s 25 facilities register for standard one-day computer competencies workshops last year, she relied on a successful Library tradition: using peer trainers as an integral component of training sessions, Janet said recently in a conversation we had. Janet and Cheryl worked with Library staff. They combined Infopeople’s Increase Your Computer Competency: Practical Tips and Tricks workshop with the Helping the Public with Public Access Computers workshop. The result was a new session which would help the library director achieve the vision she, Janet, and Cheryl had for the Library’s staff.

The results went far beyond the initial goal of helping staff learn more about the technology they were using, according to Janet. By pulling in representatives of each unit within the Library system as the workshops were being developed, peer trainers were prepared; the course content was designed in a way which would meet needs of staff at every level of experience; and the peer trainers coalesced as a group through post-workshop follow-up sessions led by Cheryl.

“It was wonderful to see how much everyone got out of the class,” Janet said. “They were able to turn to their neighbors and give help. We were building, right there in those workshops, the basis for learning together and helping each other learn. We were developing a common language and an openness about discussing what we didn’t know. No one could miss that this was a wonderful thing that was happening.”

In summarizing the successes provided through this process, Janet noted that the “computer competency learning environment has become established and staff is talking to each other, reminding each other, suggesting to each other, looking over each other’s shoulders, asking for help.” Staff has also established and is using a computer-competency wiki. And, best of all, many of the same people who made the computer competency workshop project a success are working together again as a new training initiative is about to be rolled out to staff throughout the Library system.

“It was a fantastic project,” Cheryl agreed. “That was a wonderful, win-win project for the Library.”

Cheryl has for years been doing what Elaine Glusac writes about in the April 30, 2008 Times article: using “accessories ranging from Slinkys to the video game Guitar Hero to help drum up better brainstorming”—and, by extension, learning.

Glusac reports that the “new method owes some debt to the books “A Whole New Mind,” by Daniel H. Pink, and “The Rise of the Creative Class,” by Richard Florida.” Admitting that I’ve read and admired much of what Pink and Florida have written, I also think we should give credit where credit is due: Cheryl and other Infopeople colleagues have been effectively injecting this sort of creative fun and inspiration into work, learning, and training for quite a while.

Those of us who attended some of the “Master Trainer” sessions she led in 2002 remember that the simple act of tossing rubber balls and other toys around at the beginning of those workshops helped us enjoy and learn the lesson that ice-breakers help to stimulate learning. And you can be sure that we engaged in viral learning by carrying that idea back into our own training sessions so other trainers and learners would help to spread the word.

Attendees at the California Library Association conference in Long Beach last year remember Cheryl and others enthusiastically engaging everyone they could reach by demonstrating and encouraging others to try Guitar Hero and a variety of other games. The result is that skeptics who might have seen no place for gaming in libraries walked away with a visceral understanding of how it might be effective in drawing teens and others into their facilities. They came; they learned; they had fun.

It’s no accident that Cheryl’s Infopeople workshops sell out fairly quickly. Those who know her recognize that whatever she teaches is going to be useful, applicable to their work in libraries, inspirational, and entertaining. When she teaches us about Flip cameras and helps us learn to operate them, in her Customer Service in a Self-Check World workshop, we know we’re going to be using them on behalf of the libraries and customers we serve as soon as we can bring these tools into our own workplace.

As we review Glusac’s reporting, we are left with at least a couple of reactions: the feeling that we are already on familiar ground because of what we’ve seen from Cheryl and her colleagues, and curiosity about what new trends Cheryl is already helping to establish months or years before reporters and other writers bring them to an even larger audience.

Next: Creating Trends in the Contra Costa County Library

The punch line: there currently is not a service or a solution which is going to meet the varied needs of all libraries in search of accurate virtual-visit statistics. Some of what is available requires quite a bit of staff effort to produce results; other options are easier and less time-intensive to manage.

An initial challenge, she said, involves trying to define what a virtual visit is: “a user’s request of the library website or catalog from outside the library building regardless of the number of pages or elements viewed.” Webinar attendees who were able to hear the entire presentation walked away understanding that defining and measuring visits in these terms provides a very different number than the one which we obtain when we measure each “hit”—access to an individual page or file—as a separate “visit” regardless of how many pages the same visitor viewed during one session. Most analytic software can differentiate between visits and hits, she noted.

Among the tips Sarah offered to those interested in counting visits: create a list of domain names you need to count; compile a list of internal IP addresses to screen out visits from those within the physical facilities since this group is primarily comprised of staff; check to see whether your existing software allows you to accurately track visits; and count as many pages and paths into and out of your sites as possible to gain a more accurate picture of how the invisible customers are using what you offer.

“There is no one answer. There is no one solution for people. Everybody’s situation is different. We are all starting at different points. We all have different networks. We all have different hosting set ups. We all have different web presences,” she emphasizes in a rerecorded podcast presentation prepared shortly after the webinar was over.

Those interested in more specific information about what currently is available, and how it works, will find the podcast, a list of additional resources, and a copy of the PowerPoint presentation from her original webinar on the Infopeople website. She has also provided her own summary of her presentation on her Librarian in Black blog.

• EarthDay.gov - the government's clearinghouse site for Earth Day info.


• Earth Day Network - live coverage of Earth Day events around the world.


• Green Libraries - if you're interested in ideas for your library, check out this site. You can find links to green libraries, and learn about how to make changes at your own library!


• History of Earth Day - by the founder of Earth Day, Senator Gaylord Nelson.


• ToxTown - from the U.S. National Library of Medicine, this site is designed for kids and teachers to help teach them about all of the potential toxic dangers in the home, workplace, and school (kind of scary!).


• Watching Earth from Space - News.com has gathered this photo gallery from NASA. The images were all taken from space, looking back at Earth.

Her “A Path to Learning: Technology Training for Library Staff” PowerPoint presentation from a pre-conference session held at “Computers in Libraries 2008” and her accompanying blog piece about that workshop give viewers a 56-slide summary of the essentials, including planning and brainstorming (starting with Slide 9); ways of increasing staff competencies (Slide 22); how to assess staff competencies in the area of technological knowledge (beginning with Slide 23); guidelines for creating an effective training program (beginning with Slide 31); and a concise review of the various ways staff learns—through scheduled learning (Slide 34), unscheduled learning (Slide 35), e-learning options including Infopeople webcasts and webinars (Slide 36), and ongoing learning (Slide 38).

There are training tips for those with little experience in setting up a training program (Slides 45 and 46) and suggestions for ways to celebrate learning successes (Slides 52-54) as a way to increase the stickiness of the lessons being offered and assimilated. A list of resources for those who want to learn more about creating effective technology training sessions for library staff completes the package (Slide 55).

Sarah moves right into her subject by providing trainers and other staff members with the justification they may be asked to create when they propose this level of training: effective staff technology training programs “save money, strengthen staff skills and confidence, improve customer service, show institutional commitment to lifelong learning, increase efficiency and productivity, increase staff retention (and) motivate staff to keep learning,” she notes on her third slide. Placing training in this context, as we have seen in previous Infoblog postings, can lead to the dynamic and effective training programs found at libraries including Newport Beach Public Library and Contra Costa County Library.

If this doesn’t provide you with enough guidance, you’ll find even more through Infopeople archived materials such as those prepared by Infopeople instructor Michelle Boule for her "Using Web 2.0 Tools for Staff Training" workshop.

And for more of what Sarah is doing, don’t miss her “Effective ‘Virtual Visits’ Statistics for the Annual Library Public Library Survey” webinar on Thursday, April 27, 2008 from noon – 1 p.m. The presentation will be archived on the Infopeople website shortly after the broadcast is completed.

Let’s popularize a relatively new, rarely encountered phrase—“viral learning”—and acknowledge San Francisco Public Library Access Services Manager Marti Goddard for unintentionally providing an example of how easily we can use this to the benefit of those working in libraries.

The story begins with a lunch Marti and I had little more than a week ago. We were talking about Infoblog articles on the topic of “Training, Story, and PowerPoint”; Cliff Atkinson’s Beyond Bullet Points; and how to make training and learning sticky. I had read both editions of Atkinson’s book, was using the ideas with Infopeople webcast and webinar presenters, and was about to do my first bullet-less PowerPoint presentation. Marti had not read a word of Atkinson’s book, but was intrigued by what she was hearing.

When we met again yesterday for lunch, she proudly told me she had tried a bullet-less PowerPoint presentation this week and was delighted to receive enthusiastic, unsolicited comments about her slides from those who were present—which leads us to the idea of viral learning and how easy it is for anyone working in a library to put it to use. As Marti demonstrated, it is not difficult to informally exchange word-of-mouth (or, for that matter, online) descriptions of lessons we have learned so that they are immediately adapted, applied, and shared at the moment of need with others who might repeat the process in a quickly expanding group of learner-trainer-teachers.

This really is no different than the experience I had less than a year ago as a result of taking Michele Mizejewski’s “Web 2.0: A Hands-On Introduction for Library Staff” Infopeople workshop. I knew very little, at that point, about wikis, blogs, or RSS feeds. It wasn’t long before I was using Netvibes and iGoogle to read RSS feeds; writing more than 30 articles on training and Web. 2.0 for Infoblog and CE Buzz; experimenting with a rudimentary form of wikis with colleagues in Canada by using Google Docs; and, most importantly, engaging in viral learning by describing my successes (and failures) to others who might pass this learning-training on to others in our libraries and beyond.

Let the viral learning spread!

The Heath Brothers, in their book on “Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die,” use engagingly simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, and emotional stories to make the point that ideas stick when they are Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, and Emotional and include Stories (SUCCESs, as they remind us with a word designed to make the message even stickier). They do this in a way that makes any of us who are familiar with Beyond Bullet Points immediately recognize that these are concepts to be woven into our classroom, learning lab, and workshop offerings.

When they discuss the importance of helping people learn through simulation—imagining how they might react if they were part of the story they are hearing—and through inspiration, we easily make the leap to seeing how our own stories and those of our students can lead to simulation and additional inspiration. When we read the Heath brothers’ story about a Subway sandwich advertising executive who wanted to run a campaign promoting the taste of the company’s food rather than the much stickier story of how an obese young man lost more than 200 pounds on a diet of little more than Subway sandwiches, we have to look at ourselves and wonder what lessons we are burying under reams of facts and figures and bullet points.

“The goal here is to learn how to spot the stories that have potential,” the Heaths write (p. 230), and we are again struck by how full of SUCCESs this advice might make our work.

Pink’s A Whole New Mind is equally effective as a tool for trainer-teacher-learners. His SUCCESs stories—like the one about how he went from drawing stick figures to producing a reasonably accurate self-portrait in a one-week period under the guidance of a fantastic instructor—make us sit up and ask, “Why can’t I teach and learn like that?”

The encouraging answer is that we can. By adapting the lessons offered by Atkinson, Pink, the Heath brothers, and many other creative trainer-teacher-learners, we recognize that old tools can bring new, powerful, and encouraging results which keep us all alert, inspired, and engaged.

We did tape it, and so you can now watch the archive now, or listen to the podcast version. George and Joan were hoping to get some good questions, and will be happy to respond via email to questions from folks who listen to the archive. The PowerPoint that they used can be downloaded here.