No more lunging (officially anyway!)

It has taken me a while to get back here, to give some final comments on the 21 Lunges program. I’ve been very busy, but that’s all for another time, another post. But it’s officially over; no more incentives were to be had after the 30th November.

Success rate at getting people up and running at my site was not high. As I said in the report I wrote about it in preparation for the recent meeting with site champions, I do not necessarily think it was just lack of interest that accounted for the low participation rate. Time was a big factor (fitting it in with normal workload), secondments and absences, content overload in some cases, and lack of relevance or only parts of the program relevant to some staff (and I agree that it was hard to make a case for those). I admit that at times I was probably less than enthusiastic for it too, as things did not appear to be going far, so I am a factor in the overall picture.

The introductory sessions I ran explaining what the concepts Web 2.0. and Library 2.0 meant, with examples, and why we were embarking on the program, were well-attended, but the sessions I organised to give staff a time and place to do it were not. It got to the stage where an e-mail, the initial posters I placed around the staff areas, or a casual conversation were enough to make some realise that they should do it, and that they didn’t need reminding all the time. I realised that there is only so far you can go in encouraging people to do something if they are not obliged to, before it is up to them. And I did actually help a couple of staff members from their own PC. Maybe I could have pushed harder, opened up the Seminar Room even if nobody came, or been a bit more persistent that they should give it a try, but this is all hindsight now.

I was very impressed with the two staff members who did complete the program, Orange Thoughts and on the way to work. Their insights made me realise that what I was doing was not all in vain. So congratulations to them. The program blog as it currently is, looks like it will disappear eventually, to make way for a smaller program: we realised that there were some lunges that did not provide enough insight, were a mishmash of different things, or could be subsumed into others. And the idea was put forward about running Travelling Roadshow In Service Training sessions on particular Web 2.0 concepts, run by an expert staff member. This is a great idea, so hopefully it gains support. I think it would be a shame (agreed by the others involved) if we did not have some sort of Web 2.0 focus within our Library.

Something else positive may have come out of all this – one of my colleagues is determined she will complete the program even without incentives next year with my assistance when needed, so that we may be able to present a paper at the 2009 Library Technicians Conference, as a mentor and mentee who went on the journey together, exciting if we could make it happen. There are a couple of issues, on which I could continue this blog and this may be one of them. I think I’ll leave the decision till January though. Merry Christmas!