With a lot of ground to cover in an hour, we kept things on a fairly high level. Overall though, I think we provided a nice overview and were able to dig into few areas during audience questions— we even had a live blogger who did a heck of job annotating our slides!

Some drive-by key points from the session:

• We are a learning community. It’s the combination of our LMS, CMS, and strong member / partner community that makes WJ special.
• We must design to maximize these strengths.
• Launch is dead. Iterative development of features and components is the way to go.
• A software organizations greatest skill is ading features. The most important strength? The ability to stay true to goals and leave some of those features on the drawing table.
• Our community trusts us. They’ll give us an opportunity to “get it right” as long as we are focused on delivering the tools and experience that make WJ special.

More detail is available in the slides at WebJunction. Please check them out and let us know if you have any questions.

-Tim

Full course details are listed below. As always, let us know if you’ve taken the course by leaving a comment or tag. If there are other courses you’d like to see at WebJunction, let us know that as well!

Happy learning…

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Dealing with difficult patrons is a never-ending topic among library staff, especially those working in public libraries. Every staff member dreads having to deal with a problem patron, but these occurrences in libraries are unavoidable. In reality, the number of problem patron situations is not great, but because they are challenging and often emotionally charged, they loom large in our overall experiences. While never fun, there is a way to prepare staff to handle problem patrons effectively and with confidence. This course is intended to provide each participant with a basic tool-kit that can be applied to manage a variety of difficult patron situations.

COURSE OBJECTIVES

After completing this course, you will be able to:

• Apply a variety of communication techniques to positively manage various problem patron situations
• Apply a number of coping techniques to be able to maintain composure in stressful problem patron situations
• Determine when the problem patron cannot be satisfied and to whom and how to communicate this
• Decide when to call for security or the police
• Assist with reviewing, revising and/or creating library policies that address a variety of problem patron situations e.g. patron-conduct policy, unattended children policy, etc.

COURSE STRUCTURE & CERTIFICATION

The course addresses these issues and more in a web-based course designed to take about 1 1/2 hours to complete. The course is approved for certification under the Western Council of State Libraries. The instructor will not meet with the class in person. This course is worth 3 contact hours and 1.5 CEU credits for the Core Competency areas of Policies and Procedures.

In the meantime, one more plug to join in on the feedback discussions
happening in our Help & Support area.

The WebJunction Team

As always, if you have specific questions or problems, please email us at support@webjunction.org or share them in the help & support discussions. Watch BlogJunction for additional weekly updates.

The WebJunction Team

Updates for Week of September 2nd:

• New server capacity is confirmed for an update this coming weekend, which is an important step towards improving overall site performance.
• We’re in the process of benchmarking the performance of various pages and workflows across the site using an outside service that mimics real user connection scenarios (geographic locations, bandwidth speeds, hardware, browsers, and so on). Once done, we’ll share what those benchmarks are so we can share our progress against them.
• Along with that benchmarking comes setting priorities – what situations that our members and partner see are the most critical and also under-performing? Our product management and development teams are hard at work this week on refining this list, based on the feedback we’ve received from the community (through both email and discussions – see above and help us out!).

We’ve already seen noticeable upticks in response times for our home page as a result of recent efforts, but plenty of work remains. Stay tuned for more updates.

(These updates will normally come on Tuesdays, but were delayed due to Labor Day).
The WebJunction Team

The process to identify performance issues and rollout remedies has several steps which are already underway:

Step 1 (complete):
Last weekend we rolled out several improvements to the servers that host WebJunction in our datacenter in Ohio. These improvements related to how the Web and application servers were configured. We also, starting on Thursday morning, began a scheduled process to clear server memory shortly before peak user times on the site. Servers are individually scheduled, allowing users to be directed to other servers by our “load balancing” equipment.

Did it work? Yes, to a degree. Since we implemented these changes and processes, our servers have all seen noticeable improvements in response times. While our goal is to ensure that all users are able to load the  home page in under 10 seconds, a significant percentage of users are still not experiencing those numbers. A good start, but a start only.

Step 2 (underway now to implement within the next 2 weeks):
Double the overall number of application servers that run WebJunction and our partner sites on September 7th. In effect we’re adding more overall capacity and capability. Once that’s in place we’ll continue to apply diagnostic tools to portions of the site and code that we suspect may be contributing to poor performance, and learning everything we can. This sets the stage for…

Step 3 (ongoing):
Take everything we’ve learned in Step 2 and turn our developers loose to optimize the code in areas that need improvement. This process in effect will never end – as site traffic grows and we add more functionality, we’ll be constantly and relentlessly focusing on improving performance across all aspects of the user experience on WebJunction.  This is where we hope to see the most significant, long term gains in performance across the site.

While we can’t promise “X improvement in response times by Y date”, we are confident that both our short-term fixes and long-term improvements will result in a noticeably faster WebJunction. Please watch this blog for additional updates as we have them.

Your input and experience with WebJunction is critical to helping us continue to identify and resolve any issues. Please continue to share your comments with us here on the blog, via email to support@webjunction.org, or in our help & support discussions on the site.

The WebJunction Team

We’ve had a busy few weeks getting settled into the new digs on WebJunction. Hope you’ve had a chance to visit the site, sign in and take a tour. There are a couple great ways to get started, if you haven’t done so already.

• Be sure to check out the great videos that Dale and Michael are adding to the Getting Started area especially the one made just for Existing Members
  
• Join the Experience WebJunction Project, a group created for a “23 Things” approach to the new tools
• And the Contribute page has some great ways to get involved

I’ve been especially excited to watch this week as many WJ members have taken a hold of the reigns, creating groups and contributing new and relevant content.

If you’re interested in making the most of the new tools as an engaged member of the library community, you won’t want to miss the upcoming Webinar on Advanced Engagement this coming Tuesday, August 19 at 2:00 ET/11:00 PT.

The session is designed to showcase site improvements that essentially turn content and discussions over to you, our contributing and most engaged members. If you’ve been involved in the past as a WebJunction contributor or moderator, be sure to join us on Tuesday or check back for the archive. Stay tuned for more ways to help members build the rich online community of WebJunction.

You can always find webinar details and links to registration on the site at WebJunction Webinars and archives too.

Looking forward to your advanced engagement on WJ!

Got your interest? Take a look at some helpful videos and steps to get started.

It was a busy week, and the next few promise to be even busier. We’d like to pause to share a bit about what we’ve learned, what you told us, and what to expect next.

First up, some stats and facts:

• Nearly 15,000 unique visitors stopped by last week, which would put us on track for the most traffic WebJunction has seen in any given month.
• Monday was our busiest single day ever, about 250% of a typical day’s worth of visitors and 20% above our previous all-time high set back in February.
• 18% of visitors were from outside the US (hi!).
• In web statistics lingo, our bounce rate went way down (meaning that more visitors were intentionally visiting WebJunction, a good thing!) and each person viewed many more pages than on the old site.
• More people than ever came in through direct links from our newsletters, member emails, and so on, which means you’re reading those…Nice!
• Our members love Firefox, with over 30% using some version of that browser.
• Friending was one of the most popular activities on the site – though also perhaps most fraught with things to improve, judging by the volume of support emails on the subject we received (see below).
• Creating Groups was also popular, with interesting ones such as Wordpress for Libraries and the Library 2.0 Interest Group. You can see a complete list of newly created groups in the lower left corner of the Member Center.

Next up, feedback – lots and lots of feedback came in from all directions, much of it positive, much of it very pointed yet helpful. The teams in Seattle and Dublin glued ourselves not only to the various feedback and feature request discussion forums, and our support email aliases, but also to helpful tools like Twitter (via the ex-Summize search in particular), Friendfeed, blog searches, and more. If you commented on WebJunction via anything that could be indexed, we probably heard and hopefully replied!

The positive feedback was welcome and very exciting to see, but I want to highlight some of the helpful comments and clear areas where we must improve – and how we’re addressing them. The most common comments revolved around:

1. Performance – This is one of our top priorities, and will be ongoing as we sort through, identify, and fix various things that are causing slow page and portlet load times. Over the weekend we rolled out some server improvements that are helping, based on our measuring tools and what we can see from browsing the site. However while we’re seeing some incremental gains in performance, we understand the site isn’t quite as fast as we want it to be, so we’re continuing to work on it. Stay tuned for more updates.
2. Broken Links – The two most commonly pointed out are in the Friend Request email and in the Activities lists, with links to discussions and groups. We’re happy to share that the Friend Request email link was largely fixed over the weekend, and it now takes you to your My WebJunction page, a logical place to access your Friend Requests from. The others are planned for a subsequent rollout in the coming weeks.
3. Inadvertent Slighting of the Public Librarians – When you edit your profile and are prompted to share what type of organization you are with, many of you noticed that “Public Library” isn’t there – a bit odd given WebJunction’s extensive roots in serving public libraries. This is a case where the list we intended to use didn’t quite make it into the final development release of the site, for various reasons. It’s one of our top priority changes in the next few weeks – and we welcome comments on the proposed revision over on the Site Feedback discussion.
4. Various other bugs and issues – With so many changes to the site, there are a range of other odd happenings popping up, and we’re sorting through all those reported to prioritize and get them fixed up as soon as possible.

To everyone who reported errors or had helpful suggestions, our entire staff would like to say THANK YOU! Those emails to support@webjunction.org and posts to our discussion threads are immensely helpful and will only make the site better over the long run. Please, keep them coming! Visit the Help and Support section to let us know.

We’ll share updates here both on the fun stuff – new groups, topics, milestones reached, and so on – as well as updates on the things we’re fixing or adding to WebJunction in the coming weeks. So please, keep reading, keep using the site, and thank you for an exciting first week.

The WebJunction Team

I also wanted to take a second to personally thank every single one of you that have tried the site out during its first week. We have seen huge amounts of activity this week and are so happy to see folks diving in. We are also very pleased to get your feedback as well. Most things are working well on the site, but please know that we are working very hard to respond to and address any question, concerns and bugs that have come up. And we thank you very much for your patience in those instances. This is truly a library community resource and you telling us what you think, how to make it better and what you would like to see in the future will be what helps make that future happen. So please keep contacting us, keep kicking the tires and continue to dive in. See you on Your, Mine and OUR “My WebJunction”!

Back in March, I alluded to this functionality in a post about enhanced “civic engagement” and about WJ’s ongoing goal to facilitate a highly engaged online community for library staff. Now you can see why I was so excited about putting the tools into the hands of you, the members. Sharing articles, templates, best practices, lessons learned, etc. has never been easier.

There are a number of other ways you can contribute or engage with content on the site. Please take the time to be “knowledge stewards” and share your contributions with your library colleagues. Our libraries and communities will be all the better for it.