Take Your Library Workshops Online!

Book excerpt: The ethos of every library is to serve and to instruct. Library professionals teach every day in the sense that they show patrons where to find books or how to use computers. Increasingly, however, library users just don’t have the time to attend face-to-face workshops in advance of needs that they may have. They want to know the answer to their questions when THEY need it, not when YOU teach it. Take Your Library Workshops Online! will help you move valuable “teachable moments” from the physical library or classroom to virtual spaces. It features real-life examples of how to: create online synchronous sessions, brief tutorials, and pointed screen captures. Learning in the online environment can happen in a two-minute video or in a creative meme-like screen capture and can cover topics from logging in to a database to evaluating sources. Creating these learning objects can take from less than one day up to a week depending on the time you have to devote to it and the level of detail required.