My "I really wrote too much" post on (Thing 8)

ON IM:
I’m an IM-er. I mostly use IM to communicate among my professional peers at the college, and many of the exchanges go like this:

“hey. busy?”
“no. what’s up?”
“wanna go to lunch?”
“sure.”
“i’ll meet you at your office in 10 minutes.”

That could be a literal transcript of any Thursday afternoon.

I also IM through Gmail and Facebook with my friends. It’s fun to log-on to either one of those sites and get a little window that tells you who’s online. My recent social IM’s included asking a friend who works in historic preservation about getting rats out of my home’s walls and explaining to someone else why I am unhappy with my cuticles.

Despite my apparent frivolity, I actually IM professionally, too. Flagler College has its own IM system. The circulation specialist I work with most often and I log on to IM to keep abreast of what’s happening at each other’s desks. She lets me know when a patron needs reference help but went to the circulation desk accidentally, and she gives me a brief overview of the patron’s research topic. In that respect, our professional use of IM is timely and pertinent, even more so than the comparatively slower e-mail system.

ON SMS:
I absolutely do not text message for one reason: I can’t afford monthly cell phone text plans. I am a simple, Luddite cell phone only kinda gal.

ON LIBRARY E-MAIL:
Mass e-mails about password changes or policy reinforcements are helpful to pretty much everyone since it is information vital to the functioning of the library. Big HOWEVER right here: too many mass e-mails are in-box cluttering updates on topics that only concern a few people. I get frustrated by my colleagues’ misuse of mass e-mail when I have gadzooks-a messages going back-and-forth between just two people. I don’t understand why they can’t take it off-list. Overall, the majority of mass e-mails I receive via the library are on-target, relevant, and timely--definitely improving channels of communication.

ON WEBINARS:
I recently attended a database vendor’s webinar for an interface upgrade. The vendor was instructing approximately three additional sites simultaneously, and I had no idea whether the other locations were libraries or not. The instructor treated the webinar as if we had never used a database before in our lives, not as if we only needed to see the new features. I felt like the instructor’s inability to get instantaneous informal feedback from us really hindered her custom tailoring of the course. As my fellow attendees and I walked out of the conference room, we all agreed that there was only one tiny piece of data we learned from the hour we just wasted listening to how to form basic Boolean searches. While webinars have a lot of great features, this one fell flat, in part because it wasn’t customized to our particular library’s needs.

WHAT I’D LIKE TO SEE:
OK, webinars are important but not staggeringly engaging. I think they will continue to be a source of information distribution among library professionals, especially as vendors are trying to cut costs on employee payroll and travel funds. If one webinar can service four locations, and the instructor is still at the home site, then that’s a good thing, right? Sort of. But I think it will continue to grow as people are faced with the reality of the expense of hosting on-site events.

Ideally, I would love to see IM reference at Flagler College, but I don’t see us getting into the man-power needed to support it, given our small enrollment. What is possible, immediately available, easy, and necessary is e-mail reference. There should be one general e-mail reference account that any reference librarian can log into to receive student requests. Students could write in with their questions, and we could provide answers—wherever the student is located. Our digital resources are available online to any student with a valid login, why shouldn’t our services be available alongside them?