Thing 6: Online Meetings

I went with option 1 for this Thing; I was browsing through the list of archived webinars and saw a bunch on Booklist's site that might be handy.

Then I made the mistake of picking "Booklist Webinar—Beads, Bulbs, and Books Bringing Home and Garden into the Library video archive" for my webinar.  That was dangerous.  Easy to download, easy to install the player - and crap, I want a bunch of those books now.

I've attended webinars and online meetings before, and this one was definitely less participatory, judging by the archived recording; since it was focused on pitching books, there didn't seem to be places for viewer questions while it was live.  As someone who still sometimes scrambles for places to find new titles, these archived webinars from Booklist could be quite useful.  (They could be useful to me live, too, if there aren't time conflicts.)

For having someone talking to you about forthcoming books, this is a much less pressured environment.  Talking in person to a salesperson can be more stressful, especially in a time of limited budgets.  This presents a bunch of books on a couple of related topics, and one can pick and choose which, if any, to purchase for the library when they have time to do so.

In the past I've found online webinars to be a good way to fit in a little bit of continuing education without having to eat up my day with travel time; I work in Cobleskill but live in Schenectady, and if I have to take a state car somewhere, I can lose an hour or more just picking up the car.  If staffing is tight I can still cover on-call reference and usually not miss much if any of the webinar; if I do have to miss any, I can just look at the archived version.

Another way I've used tools like this is for SUNYLA council meetings.  I became the web manager for SUNYLA last June, and they offer Skype as an alternative to attending the council meetings in person.  Usually this works quite well, and I've Skyped into all the meetings so far.  Only once has Skype simply refused to stay connected, and those of us who were attending on Skype couldn't participate at all.

One thing I've learned by attending Skype meetings is that headphone and microphone quality apparently varies quite a bit.  The headphones I use were acquired for online gaming, for use with Ventrilo, a voice-over-IP program that is more or less the standard in that community, which has superior sound quality to Skype, although it lacks the ability to tie in with phone systems.  If you're going to be doing a lot of online meetings where you'll be talking, invest in a decent headset.  (The pair I linked, by the way, is the most comfortable I've owned over the past five or six years; I can wear them three hours straight and they don't pinch my ears at all.)

Online meetings and webinars don't offer as many opportunities for networking as an in-person workshop or meeting.  You're less likely to have a break or meal during them where you can chat or talk shop with the other attendees.  They're more focused on the information disbursement and less on the personal connections.

I suppose if you include hobby purposes, I spend anywhere from three to nine hours a week in online meetings - although a good chunk of the time is spent killing internet dragons, rather than on professionally related subjects.  When you're dealing with a group of people spread across the country (or world), online meetings can be a fantastic way to coordinate.

Something I've learned about scheduling online meetings is that scheduling for EST vs. PST can be difficult if you're trying to juggle around meal times and commutes.  Too late in the day and you lose the east coast; too early and you lose the west coast.  If you're just coordinating a local or regional group, it's probably not a problem, but if you wanted to, say, have a live discussion for a book group you're in on goodreads, you might have to work around various time zones' meals and commutes if you want everyone to be able to attend within reasons.