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Design for Participation: WebJunction at LITA 08

Tim — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 23:38:18 +0000

I had the pleasure of delivering my first official WebJunction conference presentation with Chrystie Hill on Saturday at LITA 08 in lovely Cincinnati. The topic was “Design for Participation.” We took attendees on a journey that included a short history of WebJunction, we talked about our design/development processes and choices, and looked forward into the next year or so at WebJunction.

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

Featured Course: Managing Difficult Patrons with Confidence!

chrystie — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 20:23:43 +0000

Along with our new platform, WebJunction has a new course catalog with around 600 new courses to choose from. In order to help you pull a few needles out of that haystack, we feature one course that we’ve heard is especially useful or might meet an important need for library staff. Our featured course this week was managing difficult patrons with confidence. (And anyone who has worked in a public library probably knows what we mean by “difficult”. It’s not necessarily that the patrons themselves are difficult. It’s that managing some behaviors can be.)

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.

Weekly Performance Update – Week of September 15th

Kevin — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 19:47:59 +0000

Lots of ongoing, and positive, activity but not a ton of detail to share
right now – those are the basics of our performance report for this week.
In the past couple of blog posts we outlined a bit of the “how”
regarding boosting WebJunction’s site performance, and our team is hard
at work on putting those plans into motion. Last week saw the install of
additional application servers and a corresponding uptick in home page
performance (yay!), and we are working to clearly understand the impact and
next steps. More to come as we progress.

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

The WebJunction Team

Weekly Performance Update – Week of September 8th

Kevin — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:27:28 +0000

This past weekend saw a significant boost to the capacity of our site, with an install in our datacenter doubling the number of application servers. The results so far from our testing tools have been positive, with the WebJunction home page (www.webjunction.org) seeing sub-9 second response times when measured from 40 global cities across a variety of test setups. This is down from the 20 second plus home page load times from just two weeks ago. More work remains on deeper pages on the site, but we’re excited about this positive step in the right direction.

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

Weekly Performance Update: September 2, 2008

Kevin — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 14:28:58 +0000

As mentioned in a blog post last week, we will be providing weekly updates on our efforts to boost the overall performance of WebJunction.org. As always, if you have specific questions or problems, please email us at support@webjunction.org or share them in the help & support discussions.

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