What’s With Webinars?

A few years ago Susan Raab of Raab Associates, a childrens book marketing firm, and I started offering webinars for librarians. At the time few people knew what these were and although we felt there was a lot of promise for continuing education, the comfort level for potential attendees was low and there were a number of technical problems that participants had to be ready to deal with. Fast forward about three years and webinars are everywhere!

So what’s a webinar? Essentially it is web-based conferencing that allows participation in a presentation, seminar, or workshop without leaving the comfort of your own computer. For children’s librarians webinars are becoming the way to go for continuing education. Fewer of us can dedicate the travel and class time to attend face-to-face courses. Most webinars last 60 to 90 minutes, allowing us to get a smaller chunk of information on a targeted topic.

While clearly webinars are not totally replacing face-to-face learning and work better for some topics than others, one of the webinars I’ve been most satisfied with for continuing education are the ones presented by Booklist to showcase new titles. Various publishers participate and the webinars have a lot of the same feeling I get from checking out exhibits at conferences. They allow me to learn about new books in a very condensed time frame. Check out The Scoop on Series Nonfiction: What’s New for Fall 2011 coming up on September 27, for example. This is a free webinar and another benefit to webinars is that they are often archived. If you missed YA Announcements: Fall 2011 last month you can download or playback the webinar at any time.

Some webinars are offered for a fee but it is usually a lot less than the cost of travel and registration for other courses. One of ALSC’s goals to provide children’s librarians with timely and affordable professional development opportunities so ALSC has developed aseries of webinars. In October and November Barbara Klipper, youth services librarian for The Ferguson Library in Stamford, CT, will teach Sensory Storytime: Preschool Programming That Makes Sense for Kids with Autism. This is training that can be hard to find locally. If you have wondered about how to host a mock Newbery/Caldecott election in your library, Steven Engelfried, MLIS, Youth Services Librarian, Wilsonville (Ore.) Public Library will show you how. And the topics keep growing so check out ALSC’s list.

I’ve only mentioned two sources for webinars that would be of interest to ALSC members but there are many more. Share some of your favorite sources and help us all continue our education.