eBooks, audio books, electronic magazines, databases that are not freely available on the Internet but ARE available through library subscriptions… These resource can enrich patrons lives and widen their prospects.
Yet many patrons are not aware that these resources are available. Even patrons who know they exist often don’t benefit because they don’t know how to use them. This gap between what the library has to offer and actual patron benefits is a big deal. It impacts the funding and the perceived relevance of libraries generally.
Niche Academy addresses this problem by providing ready-to-use online tutorials for common library resources like
Here is a list of the tutorials we currently offer and those that are currently in development.
In addition to creating these tutorials, Niche Academy is committed to maintaining them over time so that they remain up-to-date and relevant as the resources themselves evolve.
Choose from a list of ready-to-use courses that we provide, but you can also create your own courses that are specific to your library’s individual needs. You can also share any courses you create with other libraries, who in return can share courses they have created with you.
The Niche Academy platform is built to be a compelling tool for:
Each of the tutorials begins with an introduction to the resource, showing patrons what it is and how it can benefit them. Whether you’re promoting using a blog, a web page, email newsletters, or social media posts, you can link directly to these introductions to provide patrons with a consistent and professional quality overview of each resource.
Our platforms helps you to increase resource utilization by providing instruction exactly where and when it’s needed. Rather than sending patrons to a different website, you can embed any Niche Academy tutorial in your own existing web pages with a simple, adjustable fly-out that we call the Side Slider.
Each tutorial also gives patrons the option to watch the instruction as a video or read it in a text and graphics format. You can see this embedding at work on our own tutorials page.
This hypothetical scenario shows how: Suppose you had a goal to teach 5000 patrons how to use your online resources. Suppose also that you were trying to accomplish this with one-on-one instruction from a member of your staff. Let’s assume that you had a very efficient trainer who could provide the training in about 30 min and that this trainer was willing to do nothing else every working day. That trainer would be instructing over 62 weeks straight before you met your goal. Never mind the difficulty of getting each of those patrons into the library and actually asking for help.
Niche Academy takes the training to patrons wherever they are, it’s always available--any hour of any day, and it can train all 5000 at once without batting an eye.
The patron experience is appealing, mobile-responsive, and distraction-free.
If you’ve ever tried to create your own tutorials or even tried to cobble together links to vendor-created videos, you know that it’s difficult to keep them updated over time. Niche Academy removes that headache. We take care of keeping the tutorials up-to-date.