My FirefoxPortable, ThunderbirdPortable, and PidginPortable program folders all fit easily into my Dropbox.  I have the Dropbox client installed on my home desktop, home laptop, and office desktop.  When I stop using one computer to move to another (like when I come home from work), I make sure to close these programs.  By the time I get home, all of the files have synced, so I can now see all the Firefox windows I had left open, all the Thunderbird emails I saved at work are available, and my Pidgin chat logs are there to be searched.  This has allowed me to ditch my jump drive altogether!

Caveats:  I don’t have the client installed on the Reference Desk computer, since it is a shared computer and that would give everyone access to my files.  I also have to remember to close the programs as I change computers, as it will create “conflict” files in Dropbox otherwise.  I can tell you from experience, it’s a lot easier to remember to close programs than it is to keep up with a thumb drive!

Give it a try, and let me know if you encounter any other tech tips I might find helpful!

1. Figure out what you want to measure. We polled the reference librarians to see what they thought were the most important skills for students to walk out of the session with.  Those are the things we test.  Thanks to Emily for doing this!
2. Create a form for the pre- and post-test. Ours is here.
   1. We ask them for their ID numbers so that we can match pre- and post-test scores.  Since the librarians do not have access to the students’ ID numbers–and since the professors never see our assessment results– there is no fear of retribution for “bad scores.”  After all, bad scores just mean we’re doing a bad job of imparting the information!
   2. The form (invisibly) timestamps each submission, so you can tell the pre-tests from the post-tests by the time that each entry was submitted.
3. Have the results dump into a web-based text file. We use the ProcessForm script by MindPalette, which is free.  A big thank-you to Andy in Web Services, and Sherrida and Keith in Automation for making this happen.
4. Create a spreadsheet for analyzing the data. Ours is here.
   1. The spreadsheet’s calculations are based on the number of students taking the pre- and post-tests.  So if you had 17 students take the pre-test and 19 students take the post-test, you can plug those numbers in to see the percentage correct for the number of students taking each test.  This way, if you have stragglers, you’ll still get appropriate percentages.
5. Plug the data from the web-based text file into the spreadsheet, and voila!

My class of 19 "Intro to Communications" students.

Lessons Learned:

• We’re definitely getting more assessment done in less time, and with less fuss.  So that part is a complete success.
• Students will not remember your name (or even their professor’s name, or what class it is).  Write it on the board.
• We’ll be adding more options for unique (non-identifiable) numbers, since many students do not know their VSU ID numbers.
• The results get skewed if you have more people take the post-test than the pre-test.  Students who take the pre-test will naturally do better on the post-test because they will know what questions will be asked.  Since stragglers will do more poorly in the post-test, you can actually see a decrease in correct answers.  So if you have stragglers, they need not take the post-test (esp. considering they did not get the same instruction experience as those who are on-time and took the pre-test).
• Be aware of the language that you use in the instruction session, and how that will affect the results.  For example, the truncation question asks if truncating a term will search for words with the same 1) beginning, 2) middle or 3) end.  If you say in the session that truncation will search for words with the same root, you will get poorer results.

Please feel free to use this method, or tell me your own way of measuring your library instruction sessions!

Of all the productivity tricks I’ve learned, one of my favorites is to tell folks about what I’m doing — being accountable to family, friends and coworkers keeps me going.  This works great for my job, since our Chancellor is big on accountability and assessment.  Here are my work projects for FY2009, which will be completed by June 30, 2009 (and yes, I like capitalizing things to Make Them Look Official):

• Implement a Library Instruction Assessment tool.  Now that the tool is designed, I’m working on tweaking it to make it more automated.
• Repeat the Library Website Usability Study from FY2008.  We got some great data this last year, which informed our redesign.  Now I want to see if the redesign worked — can the users find stuff more easily?
• Create a Desk Statistics Database. We have done pretty well with keeping pen-and-paper statistics up to now, but a database would allow for much easier number-crunching than doing hand calculations and spreadsheet inputs.
• Design and implement a Reference Interaction User Satisfaction Survey. Are we nice and friendly?  Did the users find what they were looking for?  Did we follow up to make sure that they got all that they needed?  How can we rawk a little bit harder?

My big project in my personal life is that I’ve taken the 100 Thing Challenge: by the end of the year, I will have reduced my personal belongings down to 100 things.  I’ve tweaked the rules a little to match my own goals, but I’ve already begun.  Most of my books, CDs and DVDs have been donated to the library, and I’m working on getting rid of clothes and excess furniture.  As my house gets more and more spacious, I’m feeling better.

The kicker is that I have not told the General Public because 1) I did not want to “fail” by not being successful by my goal date and 2) I did not want to be negatively judged for getting rid of stuff. But I always tell people to be willing to fail big to win big, so here we go!  And even though my inner packrat/archiver is occasionally screaming at me for getting rid of “something that might be useful some day,” I feel better with each load of stuff that leaves my house.

So there you go folks:  four work goals and one (big) personal one.  I’ll keep you updated!

Three steps to saving time by auto-archiving your sent emails:

First, watch Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero, if you have not already.  Create a single folder called ARCHIVE, and dump all of your saved messages there.  Don’t worry–if you need something, you can search for it.  It will take less time to search for it than it will to hunt it in an exhaustive directory structure.

Second, make sure that your email automatically “quotes” any emails that you reply to.  This is a default setting in most email clients.

Third, change your account settings to send all sent messages to ARCHIVE:

That’s it.  Now you can delete messages in your inbox that you have replied to, because they’ll be quoted in your response that is in ARCHIVE.  You also don’t have to worry about “saving” your sent messages because they’ll automatically go to the ARCHIVE.  Your entire email correspondence is now in one auto-archived, easy to search folder.