Best ideas from ALA

1. Ongoing training - We could survey employees for what they would like to learn about and have regular training sessions. Bring in people from other institutions, if necessary (could be from down the road), and use inhouse knowledge. U of M has formalized this into their Instructor College. We should also keep an eye on what they are doing and there could be sessions we could attend too.

2. Coordinate library surveys - Survey fatigue happens when people are asked to respond to too many surveys, so we should do some planning on what we want to find out from which people and how often we will do this. If we are targeting teaching faculty, we should look at the best time to reach them.

3. Good teaching methods used on me –
a. The ACRL President’s Program on Information Literacy was presented with a lot of humor and goofy “interludes” between semi-serious presentations. We laughed a lot, but we were engaged and I think it made us think more about the issues.
b. Google was handing out prizes in it’s booth, but only after you took a quiz on Google services and checked your answers with Google employees that were each demonstrating some aspect of Google. The quiz was hard, but I really did learn more about what they have to offer.