ILU Committee Meeting Minutes
KITL Lab, OISE Building
9:30 – 11:00 am | June 19, 2013
In attendance: Kate Johnson and Whitney Kemble via Skype (UTSC), Jenaya Webb (OISE), Effie Patelos
(Shore & Moffatt), Kathleen Schaeffer (Inforum), Rita Vine (UTL) , Carla Hagstrom (Gerstein), Sarah
Fedko (UTSC), Richard Carter (St Mikes), Sooin Kim (Bora Laskin), Susan Barker (Bora Laskin), John Bolan
(Bora Laskin)
Regrets: Sara McDowell (Robarts), Sheril Hook (UTSC), Roma Kail (Pratt)
1. Selection of secretary:
John Bolan
2. Minutes of last meeting:
No changes to final version. Minutes approved
3. Business arising from the minutes:
None
4. Andrew McAlorum , Digital Projects Librarian, Library gamification
a. ITS have been thinking about using game mechanics on the library website to increase
user engagement, which would have corollary benefits like obtaining user data and
identifying users for focus groups etc to obtain user feedback. At a recent web team
meeting it was suggested to bring this idea to ILU to get some feedback on desirability,
feasibility, whether ILU sees educational benefits to it so he is here as representative
from ITS to get feedback from ILU on the idea of this, which is only at the exploratory
stage right now.
b. Idea is similar to social networks like 4square, using badges and points to motivate
engagement with the web pages. So to use gaming motivations like competitiveness and
status seeking in service of education. Example : points/badges for paying fines or
borrowing or singing up for workshops. Possible ideas are working out deals with UofT
Bookstore, or gift cards. Would be a social aspect in that users could have customisable
profile pages with activity histories.
c. Motivation is points, but actual benefit would need to be considered. Is there a way to
tie this into the library? Suggestions from committee include loan extension, room
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bookings. Andrew suggests tying it to curriculum or existing programs on campus.
Andrew notes Stack Overflow site, where users answer questions from other users, and
the ‘best’ answers are voted up and made more visible, and wonders if this is worth
considering.
Andrew opens it up for questions
Q: any other libraries doing this A: doesn’t appear to be
Q: what is the purpose of the initiative?
Rita: we need an academic goal.
Andrew: it’s like a marketing tool aimed at promoting engagement and can serve as a
data collection platform as well, for identifying focus groups etc?
Eveline: those pertain to purpose for the library, we need to think about what is purpose
for user?
Andrew; gaming motivation, competitiveness, social aspect could be big as well, user
profiles.
Rita : socialization of library resources a valuable academic service, and from
implementation perspective we should remember that things that don’t require us (the
library) to seek permission or bring in external groups/departments will be easier to
actually get implemented. And socialization of resources in an area where we could do it
ourselves. So recommendation features ‘if you like this you might like that’ is an
example of something that would have a lot of benefit to users that we could
implement ourselves
Andrew: what are other areas we could do this:
Effie: there is a German library doing something like this, recommending books to
colleagues, similar to amazon.
Lots of support in the group for this type of social aspects to library materials, user
recommendation widgets.
Rita: a simple ‘thumbs up thumbs down’ ‘did you find this web page helpful’ feature has
a lot of benefit and is easy to implement. Andrew: this would be easy to implement.
Richard: a comment feature for every item in the catalogue would be really useful.
Effie: literature says peer recommendations weigh more heavily with students than
faculty recommendations
Rita: we can make winners out of people who submit, doesn’t have to be public
Richard: rating system like amazon, or as Susan notes Goodreads, can be really helpful
Effie: other system (gamification) might end up being restricted to very small group of
students like library students and high school students
Andrew suggests tying it somehow to a class participation, but a few people note the
difficulties involved in this
Kathleen: maybe doing it by word of mouth would be better received as opposed to a
full promotion, keep it voluntary bcs making it mandatory could act as a deterrent.
Jenaya: seems to be a lot of agreement on desirability of social aspects
x. Andrew: so maybe that’s what we should focus on; things like enabling comments,
recommendations, thumbs up. So perhaps we can put the gaming notion aside for
now and focus on those things.
y. Rita: suggests Andrew talk to Steven Green in Student Communications for ideas on
creating student engagement with web content, and gathering data, and socializing the
website generally, as well as gather assessment data which could really benefit us
z. Andrew notes ITS have talked to Steve a number of times on a bunch of issues, and that
he will touch base with Steven about this.
aa. Richard: asks whether online research tutorials could tie to the co-curricular record, and
Sarah Fedko notes that the co-curricular record presently does not have a virtual
component at this point, however this is something she’d like to ask about in the future,
but for the present it’s not possible
bb. Andrew: asks whether a Wikipedia style user edited page for library/research questions
would be worthwhile, because this would have a social aspect. Some participants noted
such a page would need to be policed by librarians for accuracy.
cc. Rita notes that Blackboard potentially contains a pretty powerful tool for student
engagement via socialization mechanism: this is Blackboard’s Fixit tool, that feeds
discipline specific resources into blackboard courses. Fixit will be seeing some changes
this summer, and it might be a place for some socialization features like this. It might
eventually work as a place where students could input suggestions, ideas etc that could
be shared with other students in that course.
dd. Rita: lots of great ideas here, especially idea of adding social components into and
around the catalogue and article searching
ee. Andrew: we’ve added a form for accessibility feedback in the footer recently, so we are
trying to engage more, but we do need to think out of the box, and the benefit of a lot
of this is that it could provide data for evidence based development for us
ff. Rita: randomly offered surveys attached to ‘thumbs up thumbs down’ feature has
produced a lot of good data for one library
gg. Andrew: ITS gets a lot of quantitative feedback, would be really useful to get qualitative
feedback like that
hh. Richard: gamification could be applied to all sorts of things we teach like ‘can you
identify primary sources’, could apply it to online tutorials/challenges eg ‘see how you
compare against others’ things
ii. Sarah: if this type of thing could feed into blackboard ie be as customisable as possible,
it would have more benefit
jj. Some discussion ensued over how a tutorial-game could be structured, Sarah Fedko
mentioned BiblioBouts from Michigan as a program (no longer developed) that people
interested in this might want to look at for ideas
kk. Andrew: perhaps the tutorial idea could work if it was setup as a pilot. Rita notes that it
wouldn’t require developing a separate tutorial, could re-use an existing one. Also notes
that some vendors like ProQuest and Credo Reference are in process or have built
information literacy modules that could possibly be used for this sort of thing as well.
5. Goals
Jenaya took the group through the Google doc which was a modified version of the
ILU doc for the strategic planning group:.
Big goal item#1 (Provide innovative, evidence- and standards-based approaches to IL
and pedagogy)
There are 2 items, BB collaborate and Libguides.
Jenaya: Re BB collaborate working group: the group has had 2 meetings, first one we
used the software, in the second the group talked about a test session possibly for
September to see if the tool is feasible. Jenaya is working on a blog post on this topic
that she will send to the committee members. Jenaya will forward the update to Sarah
Fedko to update those at UTSC. There is great training at CTSI on Blackboard, including
an online session in July. UTSC will also be getting a session in July.
Libguides been added under the same heading.
A couple of members noted that other groups are also working on Libguides, so there
needs to be some coordination here. Rita stressed the importance of rationalizing the
organization of the UofT Libguides. Eveline noted that there are also Libguide Admins
who need to be involved in any changes. Sarah Fedko asked that information on this be
communicated to UTSC & UTM as well, and Eveline noted that one way to do this is to
keep the Libguides Administrators in the loop, (Sheryl Hook & Sarah Forbes).
Eveline asked who else would like to be involved on this: Susan, Eveline, Kathleen,
Richard all express interest.
Big goal#2 (build effective and enduring partnerships across campus), continue to
invite speakers from other groups and partners, and plan for fall workshops across
UTL.
Hoping to get input on worthwhile speakers and partners.
Eveline: Would it be useful to distribute our document widely? It has some goals that
might benefit from being widely shared. Rita : can put it on the blog, which will be
expanding its range of content soon, and would be the object of some marketing soon
as well.
Re collaborative planning for fall workshops, Rita indicated she will be turning to that in
July, and that St George community would be asked for deeper collaboration this year.
Big goal#3 (communicating our value)
Jenaya asks how do we want these goals to show up here?
Re goal of 1 minute paper template, Rita thinks a small group should be formed for this,
might require something like a 2 hour meeting.
Rita and Eveline will figure out how to manage this task.
Registration system.
Rita: we will not be building our own system, will be buying if we do anything. It would
benefit from a small working group of 2 or 3 who could bring back information and
recommendations to the committee at specific instances. The working group would
identify terms of reference, key problems and goals, look at options, pricing and also
evaluate and bring a recommendation back to the committee. One of the big things to
think about is whether we actually really want people to register or whether a calendar
will suffice. If drop in and collecting names on site is all you want then the system is
basically a calendar. And if we want the system to do too many things we won’t be able
to find one that does that. There are many options, even a free instance of LibCal that
might work for us.
Susan: registration would fit with the gaming aspects that were discussed earlier, and
would mesh with a lot the bigger picture things we’ve talked about.
Richard: would be great to have a registration system that is fairly adaptable, using a
calendar, so students could look at it and see what’s available and click on what they
want.
Jenaya: Richard and Susan will be added to the working group for the Registration
system.
Rita: I asked what people were using for course their registration system on ACRL
instruction in library use list-serv and got no positive responses. No one indicated they
were using a course registration system. They use a calendar and the workshops are
drop-in or they use an elaborate larger system developed in-house for the purpose of
larger data gathering, and whatever course registration system exists falls within that
larger system. Impossible to find a system that does everything.
Richard doesn’t mind the existing system.
Statistics collection group
Rita noted that the goal is to create a form that gets updated in real time with data.
Leaders from different libraries need to figure out a way to get a unified form for basic
collection that everyone can be happy with, right now people use their own forms
suited to their own needs.
Jenaya will connect with Judith on this topic
Jenaya: Re leaders for the working groups, we can turn to that after the goals document
gets finalized
Improvements to ILU page
Jenaya will look at internal communication material and work on it. Whole committee
can look at the page, make sure the links are updated and include everything we want,
and think about how we can make it more useful. Jenaya to connect with Judith on
using Libanswers to disseminate ILU info.
PD DAY
Jenaya: Kathleen, Richard, Eveline & Susan all expressed interest in working on this.
Eveline: suggests Chara Booth & Lisa O’Connor as possible names to consider
Sara brought up MOOCS as possible topic, and noted that UTSC and UTM had both had
recent workshops on curriculum mapping, so although it’s a good topic it’s been done
recently at UTM& Scarborough
Eveline & Jenaya: Susan McCaan is great teacher, does Fundamentals, so question is
what topic we’d ask her about
Sara noted that people like something really practical that they can implement after
class and proposed a possibility of using break-outs or streaming to deal with the
variation in levels of experience among librarians in Instruction
Noted: Variation in skills/experience among attendees is a challenge, and we should
make presenters aware of it
Rita: this could impact design of the day, by using experienced attendees in small groups
during the day.
Sara suggests Charlie Bank from Geology as a possible speaker for PD Day. He did an
instructional skills workshop that was accessible for people at all levels of teaching
experience, and is a very lively and engaging presenter. Kate: the instructional skills
workshop was great. Got feedback on your instruction, mini-lessons, fairly small groups
of 4 people in each group.
PD day group might be too big for the exact same thing, but it might be worth
approaching Charlie to see what he thought, and see if he had ideas for something or
someone that would work for this type of event, this many people.
Jenaya: feedback forms expressed desire for hands-on stuff, so this is appealing
Eveline: how important is it to have an outside speaker for this year’s event, how
important is it to alternate between internal and external speakers for this event?
Rita: is there any benefit in combining this with a bigger liaison event, like a skill building
event for liaison librarians e.g. metrics, digital scholarship, bigger copyright issues, so
things that maybe aren’t directly related to instruction but are important. Another idea
would be ‘how to talk to faculty’ about info literacy
Sara emphasized the importance of doing something at the PD day that would have a
deeper tie-in to ongoing work, to address the issue of follow-up to the PD Day.
Eveline suggested communicating our value as a topic, Rita noted this was a big topic for
us, lots of issues around it given budget realities and uneven integration in the
departments ie some don’t know who their liaison librarian is, while others very closely
integrated with library
Sarah noted that tying PD day into a wider initiative would be ideal
Eveline noted the need to ensure it has an instruction component
No conclusions reached on speaker but working group will consider and report back
Wrap up
Next meeting in July, at OISE.