Outside In: Retooling Cataloging Outreach Efforts

Editor's Notes

1. Last year the CMS unit at USU's Merrill-Cazier Library implemented two new initiatives. Following these two initiatives, we conducted a survey to assess if these initiatives were successful and what could be done to improve them. Today, we will be describing these initiatives, presenting feedback received from the survey and outline what we are currently doing and what we plan to do in the future to re-tool our outreach efforts.
2. The CMS unit explored potential strategies to increase utility and visibility of our work to the rest of the library.  Taking into consideration workloads and project priorities, the unit members felt comfortable implementing a couple of manageable initiatives to try and assess the two we decided on were first, a single service point model for quickly addressing issues with materials and problems in the library catalog and second, an education initiative involving infographics to reach about and promote our work.
3. Under the CMS unit's old service model, when a library staff member had a cataloging or metadata related question they would consult a large "go-to" chart located at the entrance to our unit's work area which featured 80 options that mapped to a specific cataloger's expertise. This process was streamlined by the single service point model be designating the most experienced cataloging assistant to act as a starting point for all questions – the service was advertised to the entire library through emails and visits to other unit's meetings to highlight the purpose of the service and distribute the name and contact information for the person they would need to contact.  This met an internal need to quickly deal with unexpected work brought in and increased interactions between cataloging assistants and the rest of the library staff.
4. The second initiative was an education and awareness push using data visualizations – the infographics were created to exhibit the nature of our work.  We used annual and other interesting statistics to highlight our accomplishments including innovations, contributions to the field and any other things we did that had impact within and outside our library.
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6. The primary tool used to create the infographics were Visme, Canva, Tableau, and Microsoft Office Publisher – you can see more of our infographics on our blog
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13. The key to building an effective outreach operation was not just push information out, but collaborate with other units in the library.  Collaboration invited engagement and 
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15. Feedback on the original infographics we presented was incredibly positive, so there wasn’t a tremendous amount of room for improvement.  What we did do, was rethink how many infographics we created and what their overall purpose was.  We focused our inforgraphics from generalities about cataloging and inforamtion on ALL THE PROJECTS to narrow down to a very focused narrative - specific projects and one simplified general statistics (instead of all of the nuanced statistics were keeping).  Our rule of thumb was - if you have to explain the infographic, it wasn’t doing its job. We are hoping to create a digital exhibit of the infographics at some point here in the future.  Our work inspired other departments to follow suit and create infographics to demonstrate their own work.  Some of those departments approached us for training and/or advice on how to go about it.  Providing a venue for all of the library to demonstrate impact in a visual ways has the added benefit of opening up communication channels about what we do and our progress on that work. 
16. One big area that had us stumped is education.  In the surveys, we noticed a difference in the term “education” - people used this term to refer to “what projects the unit was working on” and also  “how cataloging and metadata is done”  So, how do we talk about the what and the how at the same time. Those are some really big areas to cover. 
17. When tackling the “What we do” we figured specific departments just wanted more updates on how their projects are going.  We have a number of multi-year, on-going projects that we just plug away at and mention from time to time at meetings.   But what if they could check for themselves on the progress?  We put together a couple of really low-tech, simple ways to communicate that more effectively.    We developed a project tracking spreadsheet with a list of all of our projects including the project name, how much was included in the project, the time frame we expected it to take, the current status and the primary contacts for the project (both in our department and in the requesting department).  This spreadsheet is semi-ranked by priority and we review it with our administration team and our division members regularly - allowing them input in the order in which we do things while simultaneously demonstrating the large number of things we are working on at the time.     We are currently investigating a visual dashboard to also convey some of this information more pleasantly.   We also created a joint space for us to share documentation of our projects.  Our institution uses Box as a shared platform for documents.  We developed a folder for each unit in the library and shared it with the members of that unit.  Inside of each folder are project-specific folders.  So, for instance, we are working on a very large barcoding project with our archives unit.  Inside their “Cataloging Projects” folder, we create subfolders for each project we work on for them.  Inside of those subfolders are the project charters (which we create for each project - they outline an agreed upon time frame and process description for each project).  All other documentation for that project goes into that folder - and we all have access to it and an archive of our work to refer back to.   Last but not least, we use infographics at the end of the year to summarize these projects for the larger library.
18. When we try to convey the “how” of what we do, things get a lot trickier.  Most people say they want to know more about metadata and cataloging, but really they wish they knew more without actually having to sit down and learn it.  This is hard to address because a lot of what we do requires rigorous and time-intensive training to be able to do, not to mention to understand.  Our library has a professional development gathering once or twice a month, which we call Table Talks.  It is usually a time to share what we learn at conferences, but we have used this shared time as a moment to help train the rest of the library on the work done in the unit.   We are working on developing what we call “micro-lessons” which are really short digestible training pieces that we can conduct quickly and that will focus on developing a quick but effective understanding of some concept related to cataloging and metadata.  Rather than try to teach the whole spectrum of cataloging and metadata standards, which will be forgotten because it is not utilized on a daily basis, we are attempting to put together small, really pertinent explanations and examples of cataloging concepts that they will encounter on a regular basis.  For instance, in a training on authority control, we demonstrated how facebook and twitter use authorities to tag people or subject headings as hashtags.  Because of that quick lesson, several of our colleagues have commented that they think about authority control while they are on social media and they are starting to internalize and understand not only the concept but the utility behind it.     We have found it effective to provide hands-on work wherever possible.  If you are going to talk about OpenRefine - you might as well have everyone at a computer and trying it out instead of just lecturing about it with screen shots.  The lessons are much more likely to stay that way.      More than anything - the most effective thing to do is to tie everything back to something they do regularly.  Using real-world (code for “non-cataloging” or “non-library” examples) is critical and it requires us to step out of our backgrounds and our own trainings and see things from our colleagues point of view.     Overall - engaging with our colleagues and seeing things from their perspectives is the most critical piece of outreach in our institutions