I’m not the most patient person in the world (I can just imagine my husband snickering when he reads this). Ok, I’m really impatient. I have a lot of ideas and I want them all to happen NOW. I can sometimes get discouraged by people’s negative reactions to an idea I have. It’s definitely something I need to work on, especially since I’m trying to sell ideas to my colleagues that are outside the box. I really should take a lesson from “Jane” at A Wandering Eyre, who has written a wonderful post entitled Education and Time as a Means to Foster Staff Interest. In the post, she describes the long journey she took to introduce blogs to library staff and to the rest of the University. She was patient, she offered educational classes, and she kept working on her colleagues to get them interested in blogs. Now, she’s found success and the library is going to be implementing a number of library blogs for subject guides, news, and displays. What a great success story!!!
I’m trying to sell a reference wiki at my library. After my first failure with wikis at work, I was really hesitant about doing this. In fact, the wiki wasn’t even my idea. Before I went to the effort to create categories and add info, I asked staff members, “are you really going to use this?” and they all said yes. Well, since then nothing has happened. Not a thing. I sent out instructions, I talked to people, and no one has touched the wiki. Sigh. So tomorrow I’m giving a talk through OPAL about Wikis. I’ve told all of the staff about it, and I hope they show up. I was ready to give up on the reference wiki idea, but I think I’m going to try being more persistent and to hope that at some point the staff will decide to buy into the idea.
Wax on… wax off…
I think it can take much more time than one might expect for people to change their work patterns. I was ready to start blogging at my library a long time before we actually started using a blog to keep track of goings-on at the reference desk. We did start using it though, and I think that one thing that helped the adoption was that it was a direct swap of one thing for another- the paper log book went away and the blog was there, and everyone was expected to use it.
There’s also a difference between abstract and concrete commitments. I wouldn’t ask “will you work on it?” I would ask “will you commit two hours a week to it?”
One of the reasons these things fail is that people think they’re magic pixie dust. Wikis and weblogs don’t look after themselves.
I’m emailing you my thrown-together social-software talk, Meredith. Steal all you want, if any of it’s useful to you.
Well, those who know me well know that I have little patience as well. I left out all the teeth gnashing I have done during the past few months. Maybe perseverence would be a better word then patience. 😉