Week 3: Online Meetings

This was not my first webinar, but I always enjoy what I learn each time I participate in one. Over the past year + I've been able to attend/view a few archived, as well as live sessions. Here at the Coffey County Library we are also an ELMeR site and I have had the privilege of listening in on a few classes with it. Thank goodness for the Wimba session on Iluminar!! I was so lost before that lesson! Whew! The KS Tax Form webinar was also great and provided answers to our patrons many questions about "why are there no state forms." They are still not too happy when we tell them why, but at least we are acurately answering their questions right? :)

This week I listened to an archived OPAL session titled "Gaming & Libraries." It was hosted by Tom Peters, but was originally presented on July 15, 2005 by Matt Gullett, Kelly Czarnecki, Lori Bell, Chad Brekke, Chuck Thacker, and Diane Colletti at the Bloomington (IL) Public Library.

A co-worker and I listened to this session together, in hopes of offering a similar program at our library. The information was very useful and gave us some great sites to check out as well as answered questions about how many staff would be needed and how many children to allow to attend the event.

One library mentioned that they use their YA webpage to advertise this information. Since we are part of a library system, we don't have our own individual webpages. However, this gave me the idea to create a blog (thank you week 1 lesson!) of events that we could post on our facebook page. The Burlington Branch currently has over 300 friends, most of them being pre-teens/teens, so this may be an effective method of increasing program awareness and attendance. Monica also had the idea of creating a Burlington Young Adult & Burlington Children's Program Fan Page where we could also advertise events, such as a Gaming Night.

I think this new technology is outstanding and has the potential to be utilized in a big way over the next 10 years. It's convenient and nice that you can do it from your home base whenever you have time. I know that I am going to investigate other webinars available in hopes of finding ideas for senior programming. I sometimes forget that these tools are available. I hope after this week's lesson it will stick around in my brain a little longer :)