The Libraries Lead With Digital cohort, along with European Commissioner Tibor Navracsics, Director of Grow With Google Katerina Havrlant, and six Members of European Parliament, at the European Parliament in Brussels
calls for the pilot authority project leads during the summer and autumn, and set up a team messaging service for updates, comments and questions in between.
Common sense approach Interestingly, Google didn’t join the e-conferences every week and largely left us to get on with it. I was pleasant- ly surprised by how little bureaucracy was involved. We didn’t have to put the Google logo on our publications, and there were no stipulations about how the funding should be spent. It was a common-sense approach that allowed the participating library services to run the pilot in ways that best suited their circumstances.
The lead-in time was tight and the project was scheduled to launch during the annual Summer Reading Challenge, which always occupies library staff and volunteers for several weeks every year. Schools and Code Clubs were on holiday, which made organising test groups prob- lematic. However, because the formal launch was already booked to coincide with a Generation Code event at the Eu- ropean Parliament, the start date could not be changed. So linking the Google resource-testing to existing projects and diary events made sense.
Testing resources
For Warwickshire, this meant a lot of informal testing during pre-planned sessions in the county’s new Let’s Make Spaces (see
https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=pGEu8mdeDho).
March 2019 Ayub with ALA President Loida Garcia-Febo.
We had recently opened two of these in main hub libraries at Rugby and Nuneaton, and project co-ordinator Nick Cave had a long list of intro ductory sessions scheduled to showcase the latest digital kits on offer – including 3D printers, laser cutters, virtual reality head- sets, creative software and programmable toys.
As well as testing the Google resources on the public, Nick encouraged staff to try out the toolkit and share their impressions. He made it clear that Google wanted honest feedback so the resourc- es could be improved – and tailored to better suit audiences here. The resulting feedback and Warwickshire’s final report were shared with Google, via PL2020, in December.
A learning experience
PL2020 produced an overall report – using information from the 10 pilot library services – describing the project as “a learning experience for everyone involved” and “a real eye-opener”. Between them, the pilot library services ran 152 test sessions for more than 1,200 people and developed 37 brand new “how to” guides to add to the Google digital toolkit. Google’s digital skills and coding resources proved more popular than those concerned with internet safety, and there was a general ten- dency to pick out useful elements for shorter sessions.
As the PL 2020 report stated: “There was a consensus within the cohort about certain features of the resources
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