Video training: new ways of retaining institutional knowledge

The presentation focuses on the challenges the Borrower Services Team faced in the areas of sharing expertise and retaining institutional knowledge in the time of Covid-19 pandemic. It also explores how the future of libraries is to incorporate more hybrid working and how training videos can fit into this new working environment. Initially the video project was begun as lockdowns and remote working made it impossible for the team to continue sharing tasks as before. Mutual support and expertise sharing, though ongoing, were being hindered. The MS Teams platform and email no longer served as auxiliaries but entirely replaced direct daily contact in the office. In the first part of our presentation, we discuss the Video Training Project's beginnings in response to these new challenges: the planning process, the decisions taken on the matters of content and structure of the videos, and the technical aspects of making the recordings.

In the second part of the presentation, it is shown how the project has been further developed and how the video training materials are being used and maintained since the reopening of our spaces and the reinstating of our normal services. We discuss the challenges of continuous maintenance and how our staff develop new skills required for this purpose. We also demonstrate how video materials can aid a busy library team in planning workflows and scheduling training in times of instability and/or high levels of staff absence or staff rotation. We finish by looking at how training videos such as ours can become a key tool in libraries of the present and future, helping to preserve knowledge, to improve staff adherence to policies and procedures, and to ensure everyone has access to the same levels of training.