Technology
Outsourcing 211 Service
Discussing outsourcing of any kind often causes strong, negative reactions, especially when it’s a phone service! For my LIS 550 course, Information in a Social Context with Charles Naumer, my group was asked to explore the feasibility of outsourcing Washington’s 211 service to increase volunteer and user satisfaction. Our argument was that by outsourcing services to different time zones, phone service volunteers might be easier to secure during night hours, and therefore users would have faster and more reliable service when calling the number during these hours.
Introduced during our residency, 211 service at the time was just beginning its initiation process in Washington state. The program attempts to save the phone number “211″ for social services aimed at helping connect people to the social service organizations they seek by keeping detailed database information of all of these organizations and dispensing this information to customers when they call. This project increased my awareness of public services and gave me a chance to consider some of the various social issues that these services must consider when creating programs.
The purpose of our work was to help raise awareness within the 211 organization of the potential benefits and drawbacks to outsourcing their services to other areas. Creating a professional level presentation initially caused a lot of anxiety for me because I had never been asked to present anything to a community organization before. Once my group had completed research regarding outsourcing and 211 services in other areas, my confidence grew and I found that creating the presentation was the natural progression based on our collected body of knowledge.
The following link will take you to the Producer Presentation my group created to discuss outsourcing 211 service. The file operates best when you view it using Internet Explorer:
Outsourcing 211 Service Presentation
Business Reference Pathfinder
The first project I was asked to work on during my Directed Fieldwork Experience at the Arnold Library was to create a Pathfinder for financial resources directed specifically toward the needs of the Principle Investigators (PIs) working at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. The librarians asked me to work on this project because I had recently completed LIS 527, Business Information Resources, with Nancy Gershenfeld. Due to the fact that the Arnold Library didn’t have in their budget the capital to invest in “for pay” business reference resources, all of the sources I collected needed to be free. In addition to this, the resources needed to be electronic in order to increase the likelihood that the information sought by the PIs was up to date and accurate. These two requirements complicated my task because many of the quality and comprehensive business resources available are quite costly due to the effort needed to compile them.
For each reference, I was asked to collect a certain set of information including the title, whether or not the resource already exists in the library’s collection, location/URL, a short description of the item, and the author/producer of the resource. After turning in a simple list of resources for review, I discussed my project with Kelly Thormodson, my Mentor, and she suggested that I think of how to present the information in a way that was easier to look at in order to facilitate use of the pathfinder. The final product that I turned in was a list of references organized into tables, which I believe made accessing the references much easier.
While completing this project it was important for me to remain mindful of the document’s end user. Not all of the reference resources I discovered ended up in the final pathfinder because, even though they fulfilled some of the requirements (free, web-based, updated frequently), often they didn’t include any information resources that someone from scientific community would find informative.
This link takes you to the Pathfinder I created while working at the Arnold Library:
Business Reference Pathfider (Word Document)
