I'm always impressed with when our Dean addresses us, but I was particularly interested to hear about Libraries' partnerships and encouraging efficiency mentioned in Dean Eaton's State of the Libraries' Budget presentation. While my own projects were not mentioned, I immediately thought about a personal passion of mine: coordinating training and documentation efforts throughout the University.
While working to provide Libraries' staff with training and documentation, I realized that some of the materials we made available may be of use to a much broader audience. So many of us throughout the University support email, Web browsers, Microsoft Office, and more. So many of our internal customers are asking the same questions. So many of us are creating the same resources over and over. In effect Penn State is paying us to do the same job many, many times over.
I began by sharing this work in our Libraries public Website, but this did not allow departments within the University to comment or edit. When it was decided that staff training would be moved to our Intranet, I still wanted a mechanism for sharing what belonged to the Penn State community while giving our Libraries staff one-stop training, so I created some cross-linking between the PennState Wikispaces Technology Training wiki and the training Intranet site.
This was not my first attempt at sharing on PennState Wikispaces. In the past, I'd create a draft of an item and make it public to invite others to comment or edit. This time, I really wanted to start a grassroots movement among the other training professionals I knew to contribute to a pool of knowledge. We could use tagging and macros to aggregate training across several wikis. I've been working with some of my contacts in ITS Training Services for advice on how to test this idea.
I used my wiki was a proof of concept. I used social media to promote it. The feedback I've gotten from other departments has been great. I've had many people contact me about the idea, thank me for making this training available, ask for advice on how to carry this project forward in their own units, and more.
But it's not just what we get. If they contribute, we can receive as well. Libraries can benefit from their contributions. Penn State benefits by becoming more efficient. Our faculty and staff get one-stop shopping for training and documentation.
I know that Wikispaces is technically still in test. I could have waited for a formal policy or a formal group or process to propose this project. While we wait for the right people to decide that Wikispaces is officially blessed for this use, we are wasting time. The time it takes for decisions by committee and for processes to be implemented versus the speed of technology today. The time that is used by training professionals who want to collaborate and work efficiently.
We are wasting time. Time is money. No matter where we are in the hierarchy, I think it's our place to take the intiative to save Penn State money.
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