State Agency Databases Activity Report 2/3/2013

This week at the State Agency Databases project at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases: [1]

NEW VOLUNTEERS AND A STATE HAND-OFF

This week we officially welcome three new volunteers to our project:

Susan Paterson (University of British Columbia) - District of Columbia
Siu Min Yu (Rice University) - Maryland
Flora Shrode (Utah State University) - Utah

Flora is taking over the management of the Utah page from Susanne Caro who recently took over the Montana page.

Susanne had been one of two volunteers with two state pages. I (Daniel Cornwall) am the other. In addition to my home state of Alaska, I also do my best to maintain the Arizona page. If you live in Arizona and would like to take over the page, let me know.

ORPHANS: THE FINAL FIVE

With the successful adoption of Maryland and the District of Columbia, we now have five states up for adoption:

Florida
Hawaii
Kansas
Minnesota
Oklahoma

If you are interested in adopting one of these pages, please read our volunteer guide [2] and make sure you can accept the responsibilities of a project volunteer. Then contact project coordinator Daniel Cornwall at danielcornwall@gmail.com [3] with a statement of interest and your favorite database from the page you are adopting.

DATABASE ACTIVITY

For a full listing of activity over the past week, visit http://tinyurl.com/statedbs [4]. Here are some highlights:

DATABASES ADDED

OHIO [5] (Audrey Hall)

Empowerment through Education county highlights] Summary of program activities for each county. Additional keyword searching available.

NEW RESOURCES ON THE "NOT DATABASES [6]" PAGE

The following non-database resources were added to the South Dakota section of our "not databases" page:

Adoption Resources in South Dakota
South Dakota Resource Directory for the Elderly

A LOOK AT THE VOLUNTEERS BEHIND THE STATE AGENCY DATABASES PROJECT

We recently surveyed our project volunteers about who they were, where they worked and where they updated their pages from. About 70% of our volunteers responded to the survey. Here are the demographic findings:

What best describes your current job position?

Librarian - 77.8%
Paraprofessional - 8.3%
Library Student - 2.8%
Other (please specify) - 11.1%

Responses from the "other" category included:

Circulation Manager
Assistant Director with background in Government Documents
Library consultant
Archivist with a library degree working in a library

What best describes your current workplace?

Academic Library - 63.9%
Special Library - 2.8%
State Library - 33.3%

Other options were offered on the survey, but only the three categories above had non-zero responses.

Are you allowed work time to edit your page?

Yes - 88.9%
No - 11.1%

The project coordinator is one of the people whose currrent job description is too far outside the project work to justify using work time to maintain his pages or write these reports. In full disclosure, I have not asked to.

Where do you edit your page?

Work - 58.3%
Home - 11.1%
Home and Work - 30.6%

Do you live in the state of the page you edit? (If you have more than one state, choose "other" and note which state you live in.)

Yes - 77.1%
No - 17.1%
Other (please specify) - 5.7%

In addition to the demographic questions above, volunteers were asked several narrative questions. We'll be bringing those questions and selected responses to you over the next three weeks.