Project Outcomes
Project Outcomes
List any important outcomes or findings not previously reported:
CVL.org: The State Library uses CVL.org to share news and information relevant to Colorado libraries, other cultural heritage organizations, and their patrons. This includes posts about library activities, resources, services, events, grant and funding opportunities, equity and accessibility guidance, enhanced collections notifications, continuing education opportunities, Colorado history, digital resources available to Coloradans, and more. It is a more flexible and user-friendly platform than the State Library’s official Colorado Department of Education hosted site, and it is especially effective for sharing timely or more conversational information with a broad audience.
During the reporting period, State Library staff published 209 posts to the site, and the site earned more than 303,762 visits (sessions) by users in the United States. These sessions were from 252,573 unique users in the US, and they generated 360,038 pageviews.
The Friday Grab (FGB) is a major driver of viewers to CVL.org. 49 FGB posts were published during the reporting period. During that time, readership averaged 238 pageviews per post, up 9.7% from the previous reporting period. Reader-contributed content stayed steady at an average of 1.2 stories contributed per week. Survey results from 50 respondents show that 98% prefer to receive the FGB via the statewide library mailing list, Libnet. Respondents also reported that the top four most valuable parts of the FGB were: Learning about events and programs happening at other Colorado libraries (98%); Learning about Colorado State Library news, events, and professional development opportunities (74%); Feeling more connected to the Colorado library community (72%); Viewing historic photos from the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection (54%).
Comments included:
“Thank you for every Grab Bag! They have been really helpful for our new Program Coordinator and our Hispanic Community Coordinator that we just hired recently. It has been a great resource for ideas and opportunities for them to network with other librarians and library programs.”
“Thanks for providing the FGB; I look at it every week for programming ideas!”
“Great resource - variety of libraries represented. Thank you!”
“This is a weekly highlight for me! I really appreciate all the work that goes into it. Thank you!”
CVL-Lists: CVL Lists is a mailing list service that facilitates information sharing among a variety of library and cultural heritage organizations and groups at the state and national levels. The State Library hosts and manages its own instance of the open source Mailman3 software to power this service. CSL staff provide organizations and groups with an initial consultation, list planning, administration training, and ongoing support once a list is launched.
CVL-Lists hosts more than 64 mail lists that serve more than 11,000 subscriptions. At 1,533 subscribers, LIBNET - a general interest list for Colorado libraries - is the largest list and serves as a communication tool for library staff within the state.
Eight new lists were added to the CVL-Lists service in FY23 advancing communications on digital collections, telehealth, digital accessibility, rural library issues, Colorado authors and library partnerships, and collection development. By the end of FY23, the service had sent 4,132 messages and added 1,043 subscriptions.
Library Jobline: Jobline connects employers and job seekers in libraries, museums, and other closely related fields. In FY23, 1,166 jobs were posted on Library Jobline. The job market continues to be strong post-COVID with the site receiving 40-60% more job postings (per year) than the 5 years preceding 2020. While activity has slightly declined on the site over the past year, it still averages nearly 100 job posts per month.
This reporting year, Jobline added 333 registered users (179 job seekers and 159 new employers), sent out more than 1,557,562 email notifications to jobseekers, received 463,451 total pageviews and job posts were viewed 211,212 times.
Website Creation and Hosting: State Library staff provide website creation, hosting, administrative and consulting services to other State Library offices, Colorado public libraries, library-related organizations, and other cultural heritage organizations that would have difficulty maintaining an online presence on their own. The websites provided allow Colorado cultural heritage organizations to better connect to each other and to the communities they serve. CSL staff also provide routine automated scanning of hosted sites for accessibility problems and support for clients in correcting and preventing potential accessibility issues.
At the end of the reporting period, the web hosting services maintained 60 websites: 39 for Colorado libraries, 9 for other external clients, and 12 for projects of the State Library. Together these sites collected during the reporting period more than 860,000 pageviews across 493,000 sessions from 279,000 unique users in the United States.
In addition to technical services related to website hosting and maintenance, program consultants also provide on-going training and consultation services to library staff in website administration, analytics, usability, and accessibility.
CVL Collections: This web hosting service provides creation and maintenance of custom content management systems using the Omeka open-source platform for libraries, museums, archives, and historical societies. This promotes the sharing of digital collections with their communities and the world. During the reporting period, three new organizations launched online collections, bringing the total to 20 active sites. Four additional organizations completed onboarding activities and received training, making a total of 7 organizations that are in the process of populating their sites with digital objects from their unique collections. CVL Collections participants contributed over 9,973 objects to the Plains to Peaks Collective’s (PPC) ingest into the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), an increase of 1,773 objects from the previous reporting period.
In addition to receiving live customized online training, members also benefited from 2 new tutorial videos for a total of 17 videos available via a YouTube playlist to provide asynchronous support at the time of need.
Survey results from CVL Collection program participants indicate a high level of satisfaction with the program, with 100% of respondents rating the program as Excellent or Above Average.
Comments included:
“This program has enabled our small organization to have a digital archive and it has increased access to our collections. Amy is always willing to help if I have questions. I am so grateful to the CVL Collections Program!”
“So glad to be included in this network. I first heard about it through the CHNP (Colorado Historic Newspapers Project). The Omeka system is exactly what our Museum needed, and the CVL team has been so helpful in getting us started and checking back in. I thoroughly enjoy looking through the collection, & look forward to adding our digital assets. Thanks!”
“The CVL Collections Program makes it possible for our organization to meet the needs of both researchers and all of our internal users--whether interns or students working on other projects.”
“This program makes it possible for us to have a digital collections website. As a small organization with an even smaller library/archives/museum staff (2), we could not do this without CSL/CVL help. We have no tech support at all and having the CVL consultant makes life so much easier. The documents and training videos are also a huge help.”
“CVL was instrumental in assisting us in setting up our digital collections a few years ago, during a difficult time for us. Without that assistance we wouldn't even have a digital collection. Thanks!”
Please briefly describe the importance of these outcomes and findings for future program planning:
CVL.org: Libraries and other cultural heritage organizations are vital resources for lifelong education and civic engagement. CVL.org helps librarians, teachers, and other professionals enhance their services and skills, and more effectively provide a wide array of information to their patrons.
Survey results and other feedback indicate that FGB readers continue to be happy with the service and look forward to reading it every week, and this is reflected in the average number of pageviews. Several readers commented that the FGB is particularly useful for finding new programming ideas. It appears that for now, no significant changes are needed.
CVL-Lists: CVL-Lists continue to be a valuable resource for facilitating communication within the library community. Colorado State Library is unique among state library organizations in offering no cost, on-demand mailing lists to its cultural heritage communities. And despite the overlap with commonly used social media, usage of CVL-Lists continues to be strong as evidenced by the more than 300 email messages it manages every month
Library Jobline: The service continues to grow and remains a valuable resource for job seekers and employers. There was an expectation of a decline in usage following the post-COVID activity, but that has not occurred; the service continues to receive a high volume of job posts. The partnership with Rhode Island continues to be a model upon which additional cooperative agreements with other state agencies and organizations might be created.
Web Creation and Hosting: Without these services, many libraries and library-related organizations would find it difficult or impossible to maintain a modern, accessible, web presence. This would limit their ability to share community, knowledge, resources, and expertise. By enabling better information sharing, the State Library’s Web Hosting programs help libraries and library-related organizations utilize resources more efficiently, provide greater service to their patrons, and remain a vital force in their communities
CVL Collections: Participation in the program continues to grow steadily, demonstrating that it provides a much-needed platform for smaller libraries and other cultural heritage organizations to share their digital collections with their communities near and far. The simplicity of the Omeka content management system combined with customized synchronous and asynchronous training makes it a manageable program for organizations to implement and maintain, even when staffing is limited or when the work is done primarily by students or volunteers.
Explain one or two of the most significant lessons learned for others wanting to adopt any facets of this project:
CVL.org: CVL.org is a flexible platform for timely information sharing to a broad audience. This is especially the case for the State Library that is part of a larger government department and who’s official web presence is dwarfed by the many pages of the larger parent organization’s content.
The FGB continues to be a highly used and highly rated service, in part because it provides consistent value to readers. They know that each issue contains real-world programming ideas from their colleagues in neighboring towns and across the state. The format is designed so readers can quickly scan to find interesting program listings. Furthermore, distributing each new post via Libnet, the statewide mailing list, makes access easy.
CVL-Lists: The CVL-Lists service is in its third year of operation in a locally hosted and managed instance of Mailman3 open-source mailing list software. Self-hosting any software will always present challenges, but having more control over the list software provides the ability to view and analyze raw data, and it allows better control over the various email validation techniques that contribute to a higher rate of message deliverability.
Locally hosting a list service is not without its challenges, however. State Library staff must continually address deliverability issues that arise from DMARC, IP black listing by aggressive email servers.
Library Jobline: New and edited job posts are reviewed by staff in the Colorado State Library and Rhode Island Office of Library and Information Services. This requires staff to monitor the site 7 days a week. Posts are approved within one business day, but most often within 1 to 2 hours. This is a significant reduction in wait time compared to other job boards.
Most job boards present posts as a single wall of text. Library Jobline gives employers the opportunity to post their entire ad but are required to parse out certain data elements - e.g., salary, hours, location, experience. This information is useful for providing functionality that allows users to easily filter data. It also enables job seekers to customize their email notifications so that they are notified only of those jobs that meet their specific criteria.
Web Creation and Hosting & CVL Collections: For its own purposes, the State Library has staff with the technical expertise and resources to host and maintain websites for various uses. This allows CSL staff to share information about their services and collections with the greater community of libraries and related organizations in Colorado. The web hosting programs leverage this expertise further by sharing it with smaller libraries and other organizations that, due to a lack of funding, technical knowledge, or staffing, would not be able to create and maintain a website on their own. Participants continue to value the hosting program because it provides a service that they are not able to manage through their own financial, technical, or staffing resources. The personalized assistance and ongoing training they receive as members help to ease the daunting task of creating and sharing their institutional information and digital collections.
Do you anticipate continuing this project after the current reporting period ends:
Yes
Do you anticipate any change in level of effort in managing this project:
No
Explain:
Do you anticipate changing the types of activities and objectives addressed by the project:
No
Explain:
Was an evaluation conducted for this project:
No
Was a final written evaluation report produced:
No
Can the final written evaluation report be shared publicly on the IMLS website:
No
Was the evaluation conducted by project staff (either SLAA or local library) or by a third-party evaluator:
Third-Party
What data collection tools were used for any report outcomes and outputs:
Did you collect any media for the data:
What types of methods were used to analyze collected data:
Other:
How were participants (or items) selected:
What type of research design did you use to compare the value for any reported output or outcome:
