Beyond Method 10

I have participated in Webinars but have not used any of the tools listed to set one up for anyone. The ones that I have participated in usually had their own challanges in the set up. I have to contact IT for every webinar as there always seem to be something that has to be disabled. The last webinar I participated in was learning to use BIB II, a website by Brodart. I used the telephone for the audio. The program was either Go to Meeting or something similar. We have had remote tech support for city employees for some time and the tech folks find that it saves a lot of time running around to various city agencies to fix minor computer problems.
Libraries like Seattle Public and New York Public have so many tools available to them such as Facebook and other social media. We have social media, youtube, etc. blocked, not on our patron computers, but on our staff computers. This takes all of the joy out of creating a library Facebook page with staff not being able to see it or participate. Looking at what these larger libraries are doing with Facebook or other social media is inspiring especially the Senior and Readers Advisory webinars. The ageless project is a wonderful tool to keep Seniors from all walks of life connected. Living history blogs could be created by seniors and enjoyed by everyone. Youth could participate as well. Maybe even a adopt a grandparent program could be set up. Coming from a small library with a large senior population, I would like to think that someday we will be using these tools.
Skype seems to be something that we could use now. Many of our patrons have military and relatives in other countries who would appreciate being able to connect computer to computer without charge.
I love the idea of conferencing or book clubbing with authors. This is something that we will have to look into to see what interest we have amongst our patrons and what authors are willing to participate. At the present time we do not have any audio or visual hardware that would make this possible but I'm sure that we could get the money to buy what we need if the possible conferencing were investigated.
So we have a lot of challanges to overcome but as we are to be the "Technology Library" when we re-open in January, I think we will be able to make a case for the use of these tools sometime soon.