Hopefully you all know that we routinely offer Administrator’s Training sessions. But what actually happens at these sessions? How can you justify the travel and registration costs? This week, I’m aiming answer some of those questions!
What is it?
A two-day intensive training course, offered here at our offices in Raleigh, NC. You can read up on details, download the registration form, and check the currently scheduled session dates here.
In addition to the scheduled course topics, Admin Training is a great time to get into all of those nitty-gritty administration and policy questions, both with your trainer here at Keystone and your fellow attendees. Class sizes are small, capped at a maximum of just six attendees, so there’s lots of individualized answers and attention to your situation.
Best of all, you will be training on your own database! Not the Users’ Conference database or another mock-up with fake data and semi-arbitrary settings—your very own (live or training, depending on how brave you are) database, with your own settings, your own data, and your own patrons.
What can I expect?
Your training will take place in our dedicated Training room, which (as you know, if you’ve been following this blog or our social media) will soon be freshly renovated. You will be on a workstation set up with remote access to your own database. Your trainer—probably Nancy—will also have a workstation and a projector, so you can see how it’s done, follow along, and make changes yourself as desired.
The schedule is pretty packed! You’ll be covering a lot of ground in relatively little time. The aim is more for you to understand your options, to know the various controls and information available to you, than for you to learn and remember exactly how to use everything. The small class size allows you to delve deeper into areas that are useful to you, while breezing through areas that you either already have a good handle on, or just don’t have much use for.
North Carolina Talking Books is just a short drive away, so if you’re interested in a field trip, we can usually set something up. And of course, you’ll have opportunity to try some of Raleigh’s amazing cuisine and to meet the Keystone staff.
What will I learn?
You can download the list of course topics from the info article, but here are some highlights with a bit more information:
- Nightly Configuration
This is always a popular Users’ Conference topic, but tackling it at Administrator’s Training will let you address your own settings as they are, and really get into the options available to make it work just right for your library. Fine-tuning your Nightly Configuration can help increase your circulation and even make the process more efficient.
- Maintenance and Control Files
KLAS allows an incredible amount of control over your own policy settings, so much that it can be hard to know or even for us to list all the things you can adjust. Your trainer can take you through it and help identify areas you may want to examine or reconsider. Take charge of your settings to enforce your federal, state, and agency policies, and to provide the high level of service your patrons rely on.
- Reports
Learn how to use the various reports available to you, and how to most effectively get at the information you need. By better understanding reports, you can provide more telling information about the work you do to your funding agencies. I will be providing more Key Notes posts about various reports, but again, nothing can compare to the value of seeing it work live and being able to test different setups on your own database.
Attendee Feedback
In September 2020, we conducted our first online KLAS Administrator's Training session. It was very much a trial run intended to make sure it met the goals we set out for it. So how’d it go?
We asked the attendees for their feedback, and here are a few of their comments...
“I really learned a lot from all of the sessions. I have this problem of not knowing where to start searches and Mitake took care of some of that. I am glad you asked everyone if we could record it. I have gone back a couple of times to see something that I had missed.
I am also glad that there are takeaway lessons and the manual for future reference.” Shawn Lemieux
“I would like to first say thank you for providing the training for us, it really helped me understand many processes of KLAS that I had heard about from John, but now I have an actual context and understanding of them.
I really liked the presentations as a whole; if I had two monitors it would have been perfect because I could follow along and go through the motions along with the demonstration, so for people with access to two monitors it would be even better! I found them easy to follow along as well, especially considering my background is not in libraries or library science, I was afraid it might have a hard time, but I managed fairly well. I would definitely recommend this training to others, and if I am in a management position in the future here I would definitely make sure to have employees attend the training as well.” Adam Smith
The above screen shot of the training session shows Nancy, Mitake, and two of our attendees, Adam and Tony. Everyone is smiling and having a good time.
In short, we feel like this was a success, and we’re pleased to say we’ll be offering regularly scheduled Online KLAS Administrator’s Training sessions moving forward.
What next?
Check out the "Online Administrator's Training" article for upcoming dates!
If you need further notice out, or have a particularly tight schedule, please let us know. While we cannot guarantee that we will be able to provide training on a requested date, but we will do our utmost to work with you to schedule something you can attend.
And as always, if you have additional questions, please ask! We’re here to help.
