Upcoming Webinars

Over the past two years, members of the Mapping Information Access research group, including Emily Knox, Shannon Oltmann, and Andy Zalot, have been interviewing public library directors to find out more about their experiences with book challenges. Several new best practices for policies and guidelines have emerged from these interviews. Join Emily Knox and Shannon M. Oltmann as they share preliminary findings from this research, including best practices to implement in your library.

Nonprofits and libraries are carrying more weight every day. We are asked to expand programs to meet rising community needs while simultaneously shrink our budgets. The idea of  “doing more with less” has reached its breaking point. Join Emma Kieran as she helps leaders and teams rethink how they set priorities in a world where everything feels urgent. We’ll discuss practical ways to determine what is critical and how to align staff and board around realistic capacity. We'll talk about shifting from reactive to proactive and intentional decision-making. Join us to learn how to confidently prioritize the work that truly drives impact.

Imagine a student or patron who needs mental health care. Now, imagine that help exists, but the path to it is confusing, hidden, stigmatized, or buried online. Would that person still reach care? Mental health support is often available, but students and patrons may not know where to look, whom to trust, or how to take the first step when needed most. Join Jesse Scaccia to explore mental health care access as a media literacy challenge, identify communication barriers students and patrons face, and consider how librarians can become trusted guides who help people find information, campus resources, and pathways to support.

How nimble is your library? If a staff member is gone for an extended period of time, can their major job duties be covered? Do your staff want to build new skills? Cross-training is a solution to all of these challenges! Whether you work in a single library or multi-branch system, there are multiple ways to design a cross-training program to help your staff grow and enable your library to rapidly adapt to changing needs. In this session, Garrison Libby and Emily Leachman will discuss the benefits of cross-training and ways to implement it at your library.

Join Niche Academy’s Margaret Helthaler for a look at how to build an effective training system without trying to do everything at once. Margaret will show how to start with one audience, one priority, and a clear outcome—then turn that plan into a manageable training program. You’ll get a step-by-step framework you can use right away, along with short demos that show how Niche Academy helps you find ready-made tutorials, create or organize training content, assign training, review learner progress, and use data to decide what to improve next. 

Difficult conversations are inevitable, but that doesn't mean we should avoid them. Whether you avoid difficult conversations to keep the peace, freeze up when trying to negotiate with others, or feel bad when you’re responsible for giving bad news, the anxiety and fear you feel are more common than you think. And while there is no shortage of workshops and webinars that talk about communication skills, true confidence in hard conversations comes from both mastering ourselves as well as mastering the art of facilitating the conversation. Join Chris Wong to learn skills to go into conversations feeling prepared, as well as proven communication techniques to create an environment of collaboration, rather than fighting.

Hannah Cyrus will cover how to frame generative AI to patrons in ways that are aligned with library values, including tips for reference interactions, passive programs, direct instruction, and teaching classes. From quickly explaining to low-digital-literacy patrons how this technology works and why it is not a reliable information source, to finding opportunities to correct misunderstandings among enthusiasts, to providing directions for how to turn the darn things off, attendees will come away with strategies for pushing back against a technology rife with labor, environmental, and social concerns that library workers can take a stand against.