Introduction

I was hired as a reference and instruction librarian.  However, a great part of my career has been spent as the libraries' Web Content Manager and IT representative before the library hired a part time technician.  When I began, the libraries' website was maintained by a non-librarian staff person.  This was not an ideal situation for the librarians, who often had to interpret their needs for the website.  Additionally, the libraries did not have direct access to the server, so time was a huge factor in getting changes made.  When I took over, I quickly taught myself Dreamweaver, the content management system used at the time, and we were also able to convince the administration at the time that the libraries were self sufficient enough to maintain their own website.  I was then given access to the server, which dramatically changed the way we were able to update and edit the website, and has had a great impact on our users.

Professional Development

My work has morphed into so many things.  My scholarship is not so much defined only in concrete documentation, as is evidenced by the changes on the libraries' website and everything technology related, but also by my Literacy Instruction sessions and my adjunct teaching.  Nonetheless, I spend a great deal of time trying to keep up with the technologies and directions of libraries, and bring that to my work, in a way that is useful and meaningful to our users.  Over the years, we have informally and formally gauged the usability of our website, and made changes based on those recommendations.  I am also involved in determining useful electronic resources and how to best present them, the way they look and work.  So I sometimes have to modify database interfaces, language, etc. to the libraries' needs.

Usability Study

We wanted to understand how our community use our website and how we can help them to use it better.  I created a Usability Study (see attachments) which  we administered to a small group of students, faculty, staff, and administrators last summer.  There were some significant changes made based on the results.  Librarians have historically talked in "library language" and this study revealed that users would prefer things to be called what they really are.  So as an example, the "Books and Media Catalog" became "Find Books" and the "Periodical Locator" is now "Find Journals...".  Also the placement of items and how many "clicks" it took to get there were revealed as some of the frustrations our users had.  So we made changes accordingly.  My plan is to continue to do these studies and make our site as intuitive as possible, so our users, especially our remote users, have zero or little difficulty accessing our resources.

Web 2.0 Technologies

The libraries' have gone from a simple email reference online form, to a chat and text service.  I investigated several different services and decided on our chat service, Libraryh3lp, which is built specifically for libraries.  This of course involved a lot of self training, since I have no formal education in writing codes and other advanced design.  However, our users are extremely pleased with this, and it becoming a very popular mode of communication.  I also created social media pages - Facebook and Twitter, which I use to post libraries hours, workshops, etc.  I am also presently working on making all mobile versions of our resources available, to increase the use of our resources on as many platforms and mobile devices as possible.