Welcome to Informatics

My name is Ann Johnston and I am the Informatics & Curriculum Librarian at Benner Library located on the campus of Olivet Nazarene University.  My other main responsibilities aside from being the head of Informatics and of the Curriculum Departments is to help cover reference desk and act as library liaison to the Military Science program and the School of Education.  I also support the SGCS Research Librarian with grad school specific endeavors.  

The main focus of this blog will mostly pertain to the Informatics portion of my position.  I’m often asked, “What is it that you do?” or “What exactly is Informatics?”  It is such a difficult question to answer because there are so many aspects of our department and even mini-branches within our department.  The main purpose of Informatics is to research, test, implement, and utilize technology to increase library efficiencies and usability. 

The Informatics office serves as a first line of defense for IT issues, we troubleshoot software issues, collect and produce reports on a wide range of library-related statistics, storage and backup maintenance, maintain the library website, maintain the usage-end of electronic resources, produce the majority of library tutorials, maintain the library labs and printing functionality from a usage/patron perspective, produce a variety of programs usually library specific, iPad training and education, graphic design, photography and photo editing, research and testing of new technologies and programs, and training when needed.

This week our office dropped in our new library website (a two year project that I will discuss in a later entry) and all week my family has been asking me how it is going.  I realized by their questions that not even the people closest to me have a full understanding of what I do for a living.  (For those of you from the Friends generation, I feel a bit like Chandler.)  This project and a couple other accomplishments in our department this week also made me realize that the Informatics Staff do not get enough recognition for some of their accomplishments.  Because of these two issues, I have decided that I need to communicate and document more of what is being accomplished in our office.  Thus the purpose of this blog…

I will be the main author of the blog but I may sometimes ask my staff to write up a general summary or steps followed for specific achievements and I will include those in some of the entries.  I hope that not only my family will gain insight to what we are about, but that the Informatics staff can also show off some of their accomplishments to their family and friends.  If in the end some of our entries prove to help out someone with the same types of issues that will be an added bonus.