Week 3: Online Meetings

Online meetings are something familiar to me. Within the state, I'm pleased at how we bring people together for meetings in ways that save the time and expense of travel. Our library makes a lot of use of webinars for training purposes.  The ability to make use of archived sessions is particularly helpful because it gives us greater flexibility in when and how we make use of this information.

I am also a fan of George Needham sessions so I selected an archived webinar that he and Joan Frye Williams conducted in November 2009 entitled "George and Joan on Revitalizing the Library Experience." The session offered useful information about reframing how we think about customer service in  libraries. It is well timed for us in Wichita because of the work we are doing on a building program for a new Central Library.

As a Library that operates as a department within a larger City organization, I often find that the Library sees the potential and embraces new technologies faster than most other departments.  We're still ahead of the curve with online meetings.  Our biggest challenge in making full use of these sessions is convincing our IT department to adjust our network configurations so that we can make use of some of the products.  Maintaining network security must remain a priority, but we need to find ways to balance that with access requirements of products for online meetings and collaboration.