2012 Best Practices for Government Libraries

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BEST PRACTICES 2012
students need to have with current technology, but also a willingness and drive to
continue to learn and stay up with new and emerging technology (Weldon, 2012).
Through a survey on business professionals being computer savvy, it was
found that the work-ready college graduate may not know how to code but they
would be able to troubleshoot and problem solve technological errors. This
troubleshooting and problem solving would translate into a work-ready individual
who could understand what computers could do and what software to download to
help them with work-related tasks (Weldon, 2012). Work-ready individuals would
understand impacts of emerging technologies and attitudes, behaviors and needs of
information users (Weldon, 2012).
The Study
The nature and purpose of the study was to determine if college graduates
were work-ready. This was examined through the skills of a computer savvy
individual. Computer savvy was defined as one emergent theme to analyze for this
study. The research design is qualitative purposive sampling by selecting groups of
individuals based on college degree and computer savvy comfort level (Patton,
2002). Computer savvy levels would show the work–ready level of college
graduates (Weldon, 2012).
The survey was conducted from April 19, 2011 to April 20, 2011. The
population were 89 business professionals who worked in libraries, associations,
government agencies, law, and health sciences sectors. The lowest degree was a
high school diploma while the highest degree was a doctorate. The participants
came from 26 states and four countries. The survey was created through Survey
Monkey and the link was sent to the following listserves: Society for American
Archivists; Maryland and DC Chapters of the Special Libraries Association;
Association of Independent Information Professionals; Maryland Library Association;
ASAE. Participants had given their permission to participate in the survey when
clicking on the link to begin the survey, after reading the letter that preceded the
link. The protocol established for the survey was guided by one important
question: To what extent does a college graduate understand the learner support
and problem-solving levels for computer usage?
Findings
From the participants with Master’s degrees and doctorate degrees, it was
found that a college graduate was defined as a computer savvy person who:
1. Had an understanding of how a computer system worked;
2. Could be able to intuitively navigate open source content management
systems options on the fly;
3. Could be able to troubleshoot any technical difficulties without outside
assistance;
4. Could have the understanding of how these pieces fit together and impact
one another.
From the 89 participants, the amount of participants who knew what the
phrases meant can be seen in Table 1. From these participants, all blamed their
colleges and universities for not teaching these terms to them or they had
completed their education before these concepts were used.