MLA Tech Committee Meeting

Hidy Ho,

I was getting ready to write up my thoughts from today's MLA's Technology Committee Meeting and I thought, why not post these things to the Learning Journal Blog? So, here's to trying something new. Plus I think this will help aid WMRL's efforts in being more transparent to our colleagues in Washington, Allegany, and Garrett counties.

I was recently asked by Margaret Carty, Executive Director of the Maryland Library Association, to represent the Synchronous Trainers group on the MLA Tech Committee and so, today was the first time I attended a meeting with this group. Below are some of the most pressing issues we discussed and I'd welcome your thoughts and comments on the matters so that I may share them with the committee via email and/or via our next F2F (face to face) meeting.

SMUG: Social Media Users Group
The tech committee recently received a request from Mary Baykan to consider creating a social media interest group for the purposes of:

1. Focusing on eLibrarians and other colleagues across the state who are responsible for maintaining our libraries' virtual spaces such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogs, etc. and to give those folks a support network so they can collaborate and share efforts. (Mary, if you're reading this, please feel free to clarify because I'm paraphrasing Stuart Ragland's and Amanda Bena's words)
2. Creating social media focused staff development programs at the MLA annual conference and as stand-alone programs throughout the year.

The committee decided that we are definitely within our limits of creating such a group but Margaret is going to approach Elizabeth Hulett to find out who exactly from the Maryland Library Leadership Institute was interested in working on this project and then after that, we as a committee can just help get the ball rolling and perhaps offer one of our members up as a liaison to the SMUG. So, a lot of this is still in the works.

Tech Committee's Conference Review:
We took some time to review the committee's role during MLA's most recent annual conference. The majority of the heavy lifting was done by Carroll County - who provided the majority of the technology and the tech support during the event - plus Stuart Ragland (EPFL/SLRC) and Scott Reinhart (CCPL) who were the two primary videographers. This lead into a discussion about if and how library systems are awarding CEUs for staff who watch the videos of the recorded conference programs.  Margaret asked me to send out an email to the Maryland Staff Development Coordinators listserv to informally poll what the systems are doing. I've asked - at least of the WMRL staff - that in order to earn CEUs they must watch a video in its entirety and then post a learning reflection to this blog. Both must be completed before I will award a CEU.

We then discussed how we record the individual programs and if there is a better way of recording them to make them more valuable - for instance, is there a way for us to videotape a program and then synch the audio/visual with the presenter's PowerPoint slides? There was also a request from one library system that we find a way to make the videos closed captioned so, we're going to look into that as well.

Charging for MLA Webinars:
Margaret asked the committee to make a recommendation to the Professional Development Panel (these folks screen and approve/disapprove all MLA non-conference programs that are received throughout the year based on content, presenter, etc) regarding the idea of charging for MLA programs that are webinars. We decided to recommend that any MLA programs that are going to be offered in webinar format should follow the same guidelines as those programs being offered F2F which pretty much comes down to charging a minimum of $10 per contact hour awarded; the price could increase to cover any presenter fees.