As the Digital Outreach Librarian for the Job & Career Education Center (JCEC) (opens in a new tab) at Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh (CLP) (opens in a new tab), I created 22 tutorials for job seekers in collaboration with my supervisor, Wesley Roberts.
The JCEC is a well-known and highly respected community resource for job-seeking assistance throughout the greater Pittsburgh region. However, face-to-face services are primarily confined to the main library location in the Oakland neighborhood. Some patrons, including those of non-CLP libraries in the suburbs, can’t travel to Oakland to take advantage of all the available services. To better assist those patrons and to improve our service to other libraries and librarians in the region, the JCEC undertook the tutorial project with the ambitious goal of making quality job-seeking materials available to anyone with an internet connection.
Before examining local data, we conducted bench-marking analysis of other public libraries (with and without a dedicated team or department for job-seeking assistance). We discovered that few public libraries had online materials for job seekers.
To efficiently manage our time and limited grant funding, and to meet the needs of the largest number of patrons, we reviewed usage data for JCEC programs, web pages, and in-house statistics to determine the most-needed material. Patrons overwhelmingly sought resume assistance more often than any other service. Once we determined a priority list for tutorial creation, we also categorized current and proposed library content/resources into meaningful job-searching stages: planning, applying, and interviewing.
I fully scripted and storyboarded each tutorial before I began recording. I recorded and edited audio using Audacity. For some tutorials I used PowerPoint presentations using the Camtasia plugin. For other tutorials I used images and screencapture. I edited and finalized all tutorials using Camtasia 7. To make the tutorials as accessible as possible, I included tables of contents and captions. We embedded videos into our site as .mp4 files.
To gather useful data, each tutorial included a link to a brief survey created with Google Forms. Survey responses stay in Google Drive. We used responses to inform JCEC programming. For more information about preliminary survey results, please see the article Wes and I published on this project.
Note: As of late Spring 2016, the JCEC tutorials are no longer available online. After a full CLP web redesign, not all content migrated to the new site. To view the tutorials, please follow the sidebar link.