We do an email Quick Quiz once a fortnight for staff. We send an email to them, focused on one of our online resources, asking three questions that involve them just doing quick exploration of the resource to answer. They then submit the answers and it is included in their performance appraisal.
We started this process as a means of making staff aware of our subscription databases and the basics of how to use them, so in turn they could promote them and their use to library users. However, it has become more than that.
Quite a few staff have taken to them enthusiastically and have completed the majority of them. There is quite some pride in their achievement, both on their part and on mine.
But of course, on the other side, are the staff who never seem to find a few minutes to complete the quiz once a fortnight. However, I haven’t given up on them.
One of the things we are trying is to change things up a bit. Rather than just having the quick quiz on one of our online resources, today we sent our first quiz out on our ILMS item search. We chucked in few curly questions as we would expect our staff to be well versed in it’s use, but I was pleased to see that from the responses I have received already, that most were well on top of things.
What it has also done is to generate a bit more interest and enthusiasm. People are keen to test their skills and even challenge what they think they know and that is what we aim to do here.
Besides our ILMS, which we will run more quizzes on, we will also do some on our events bookings, PC management system, Google calendars, discovery layer and more.
It’s early days yet, but it looks like changing things up here will help generate more interest and help up-skill even more staff. If that’s what can be achieved on this small scale, we will have to look at what we can achieve doing the same thing on larger scale projects.
I would love to hear any experience of changing things up which worked for you or your library.