Assessing staff technology skills with TechAtlas

The next event in WebJunction’s continuing series of TechAtlas webcasts will be on Wednesday, August 16. We’ll be discussing the Staff Skills Survey, which is a convenient tool within TechAtlas that allows you to survey library staff members by e-mail.

Survey-takers perform a self-assessment of their technology skills in several key areas, and TechAtlas aggregates and organizes the data to help you plan for future staff training needs.

Our webcast on August 16 will also introduce enhancements to the Staff Skills Survey that are currently under development. To learn more, visit WebJunction’s TechAtlas Online Learning Opportunities page and register for this free webcast!

Live chat coming to TechAtlas

Beginning on Friday, 7/28 TechAtlas users will be able to chat with other users, and with the people who maintain and support the tools. We’re planning to offer 3 hour blocks of time for chat each week, hosted by WebJunction and TechAtlas staff. We’ll consider expanding the availability of (both hosted and unhosted) live chat based on results of our initial attempts. If you have any comments or thoughts on how to best manage live chat for TechAtlas, please let us know — we’d welcome any suggestions as this is our first attempt at this. Hope to chat with you on Friday.

Live Chat for TechAtlas

Recently I used a tool called Gabbly, an online chat tool that can be added to any website. I'm thinking we could host live chat on TechAtlas for a limited number of hours each week for logged in users. Anyone logged in could chat, and we'd have a host online to help moderate and answer questions. I think it would be interesting to see what questions surface when people have an easy way to chat directly with someone. What would you think of a chat session on TechAtlas for librariese to be held on Friday mornings, 9am-12n? I'm thinking that having a designated timeframe would allow us to staff moderation adequately, and focus attention so we wouldn't have dead time. I'm thinking we that WebJunction can add Gabbly using the sitemanager content editor on the start page, providing a link when chat is to be active and removing it when it's inactive.

Enhancements to the TechAtlas Event Tracker

Thanks to those of you who submitted feedback around the proposed "network notebook" for TechAtlas. You gave us some great suggestions to mull over…

Our next area of design concentration is the TechAtlas Event Tracker tool, which we discussed during a WebJunction webcast last week (see the TechAtlas Online Learning Opportunities page for archived documents from that session). The following list presents Event Tracker enhancements that have been suggested to date – let us hear from you if you have additional suggestions on how we can improve the Event Tracker:

• Provide a read-only view of the list of Event Tracker events, so staff members can see what events have already been reported. The goal is to provide a way for staff to see what issues have already been logged in order to avoid duplication.
• Add a date sort ability on the Date column in the event table.
• Add an alphabetically sortable Work Area column to the event table.
• Add a text search function to the main Event Tracker page. This would allow the user to do a free text search on the Description and Resolution fields from each event, and optionally filter that search by values from the Event Type and Status fields.
• Allow users to assign events to Work Areas (i.e. library branches or physical locations within the library).
• Change terminology on the Event Form so that the Resolution field is re-named to the Action field.
• Allow event reporters to choose to receive automatic e-mail updates each time that an event record is modified. This provides a status reporting mechanism for the person who reported a particular event.
• On the Event Form, modify the Event Type drop-down list by moving the blank entry (currently number 8 on the list) to the top of the list. Re-word the blank to something like "Click to select Event Type."
• Allow individual libraries to modify the block of instructional text at the top of the Event Form page. The goal is to allow libraries to add customized instructions on properly selecting items in inventory and event types according to local practice.
• Allow user to select Software Subscriptions in inventory on the Event Form "Track an event for" drop-down list. Software subscriptions are the only inventory category currently missing from this list.

A “network notebook” for TechAtlas

As we draft designs for the various planned areas of enhancement for TechAtlas version 2.3, we'll post some of the relevant documents here on the blog in order to solicit feedback from the user community. If we get your feedback early in the development cycle, we still have time to consider and implement your suggestions!

First up is the network notebook. Some of you may already be familiar with the Downloadable Technology Plan that is currently available in TechAtlas (you can find it on the Evaluate tab). The network notebook will be a similar function that will aggregate all of the technical inventory data that you have entered into TechAtlas, and allow you to download that information in a word processing file format.

The goal is to give you a convenient mechanism for pulling together your inventory data and creating a physical or electronic document that can serve as a single source of critical information on your library's Internet connection, local area network, telecommunications equipment, computers, etc.

Attached is a draft of the proposed format of this network notebook. The actual document in TechAtlas will be downloadable in either Microsoft Word (.doc) or Rich Text Format (.rtf). Take a look at the attached template and let us know:

• Is there important information that ought to be in such a network notebook that is missing?
• Not all fields shown in the template (such as passwords) can be populated by TechAtlas, so some of them would be left blank for the user to complete in the downloaded document.  Is it useful to retain these blank fields as "placeholders" in the template?
• Is it useful to include a generic client/server or peer-to-peer network architecture diagram, as shown in this template?

Take a look at this template and post your feedback as comments to this blog entry, or send your ideas to Jeff Hall at WebJunction.

Beginning the real work

Today we held a kickoff meeting for the TechAtlas "phase three" development project. This project will eventually lead to the release of a new TechAtlas version 2.3 later this year.

As we begin to draft our designs for new functionality that we hope to introduce in TechAtlas 2.3, we will be asking WebJunction members who are current TechAtlas users to provide us with feedback on those proposed new features. We need your help to keep us on track in delivering TechAtlas features that will have immediate value for libraries using the tool.

We'll be posting more details on proposed new features for TechAtlas in the near future, but in the meantime, if you work in a library that is using TechAtlas and would be interested in providing feedback on the TechAtlas 2.3 development process, please drop a note to Jeff Hall at WebJunction.

We’re making a list…

As we gear up for an additional round of software development work on “WebJunction’s TechAtlas“, we find that suggestions offered up by TechAtlas users provide ideas for enhancements that are both strategic and tactical in nature.

Just yesterday, a TechAtlas user from a public library in Missouri suggested that we expand the list of peripheral types in the TechAtlas inventory tools to include UPS (uninterruptible power supply), in addition to the existing selections for printers, routers, fax machines, etc. While this is a fairly straightforward suggestion, and not a big challenge to implement, it’s exactly the type of “fix” that we would have missed without feedback from the community.

So keep those ideas coming our way, whether they be big issues or small issues. We want to make the TechAtlas tools as relevant for public libraries as we can, and we need your ideas to do that! Let us hear from you in comments posted to this blog, or by e-mail at techatlas@webjunction.org