On April 1st, the San Jose Public Library will launch its Database Delight online training program for staff.  Riffing off of the 23-Things model, we created a 13-week self-paced online learning program for staff where they learn a different database every week.  All staff are invited to participate in this self-paced online learning activity.

There are individual and group incentives to participate too.  Over 40 staff-donated Prize Packs are raffled off at the end of the program.  If you participate for one week, you get a raffle entry.  If you participate all 13 weeks, you get a bonus 5 entries.  In addition, the branch or unit with the highest percentage of participation and completion will win the “Database Awesomeness” Pizza Party for entire branch or unit!

The program was created by the SJPL Staff Development and Training Team (which I chair) and the Electronic Resources Team in response to a growing need for eResource awareness.

Why did we decide to do this?  Like most libraries, we have found that we could improve upon existing staff experience with and knowledge of library eResources.  As the chair of the Training Team, I strongly believe that all staff, no matter what position or experience, should be familiar with the library’s collections and services–both physical and virtual.  This training program is inclusive of all staff and will hopefully help us meet this goal.

The three biggest challenges:

1. Finding training time for staff. Staff time is at a premium, and with huge budget cuts looming it has become even more imperative for everyone on board to become familiar with our digital collections.  Hosting the program online and letting people find the 30-60 minutes per week whenever they can will hopefully help with that problem.
2. We had no prizes. Due to City of San Jose policy, we are not allowed to spend library money on prizes for staff (it’s seen as “paying staff twice to do their jobs”).  Wait, it gets worse.  We are also not allowed to solicit local businesses for donations either.  So we were left with no prizes until we hit on the idea of asking our staff to donate the very prizes that we would raffle off.  The prizes (or incentives, as we call them, as the city won’t let us use the word “prize” either), are not huge as a result and not everyone will get something.  But it’s the best we can do with a bad situation.
3. The technology. As much as it pains me to say this, sadly our library is still in a technological state where we cannot host blogs on our web servers.  We ended up hosting the site on a free WordPress blog (thank goodness for that).  And all of the photos are hosted on our Flickr account, in a set just for the prizes.

So what’s next?  I encourage other libraries to think about using this training style to teach staff and customers about your online resources.  Our next project is to do the same style training for our eBook and eAudioBook collections.  If you want to learn more about how it works and what we’re doing, check out our “About this Project” page.

Sarah Houghton-Jan