On-Demand Webinar: User Engagement: New Approach and Tools

Public libraries face challenges and opportunities in reshaping their community profile, especially post COVID. This webinar, taking an international perspective, highlights how emerging community engagement solutions can help target existing and potential users in repositioning public libraries and refreshing their services. While public libraries have always engaged with their users and the wider community a new generation of community or patron engagement solutions has now emerged to help libraries revitalise engagement with their communities. The presentation will describe their attributes, the opportunities they address and benefits they can bring.

Learning Outcomes: 

• demonstrate the need for more effective community engagement;
• better understand the context and articulate the need for a new approach to community/patron engagement;
• understand the capabilities of new 'community/patron engagement' solutions and other engagement tools;
• define the value and benefits that new 'community/patron engagement solutions can bring; and
• articulate the wider strategic context for the need for new tools to support new approaches to community/patron engagement

Who Should Attend: Librarians in a strategic role who are looking at ways to refine their "offer" to users to make it more relevant and better meet user needs.

Presenter:

Ken Chad gained his Master’s degree from the Information Science Department at City University in London. He is also an alumnus of the Warwick University Business Innovation and Growth Programme. He worked as a librarian before spending over 20 years in the library technology business. Ken worked in customer support, project management, implementation, sales and marketing and as executive director and board member.

He set up his consulting business in 2007 to help make libraries and archives more effective. His consulting activities include help with strategy, innovation, improving the user experience, reviewing/auditing library IT infrastructure and systems, and the procurement of new and replacement systems. His work also encompasses ebooks, resource management and discovery, open and linked data, repositories, archives and research management solutions. In addition, he provides market intelligence and horizon scanning services for and about the information and library technology sector.

Ken is a member (MCLIP) of CILIP and ALA. For six years to 2016 he was a main committee member of UKSG and until 2016 was a committee member of the NISO Open Discovery Initiative (ODI). He set up and manages a number of free, open community resources including Higher Education Library Technology (HELibTech) and Local Government Library Technology (LGLibTech).

Tech Requirements