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Let's talk! CMLE Google Groups, and more

orville-2
Orville likes to talk about libraries and library issues!

As we travel around to visit and talk with library people all around the system, we ask everyone what we can do to the help them get their work done. Our jobs are to make your jobs easier, and to help us all work together more effectively. And the one thing we consistently hear is that everyone wants to connect more easily and more frequently with their colleagues in other libraries.

As a system, working to connect everyone together, we want that too! So we are working out some strategies for helping you to get connected in a way that works for you.

One strategy is to set up a variety of Google Groups for you to join as you wish. You can post discussions, ask questions, share material, and set up chatting and Hangouts. So far, we have groups set up for all kinds of different organizations, and you can join any of them. We will be adding groups based on topics you might want to discuss on a regular basis (copyright, information literacy, planning, etc.), but Google takes a while before they let us set up more groups.

So we can dive in here and get started with sharing! While we don’t anticipate everyone will contribute huge amounts of discussion (though, of course that is fine too), we want to start having places where you can chat with each other, ask questions, and generally consult with your colleagues outside your library!

Note: although we envision these as being part of the strategy to connect CMLE libraries, if you are a library person outside of our system it is fine to join and discuss your library topics here. We want to build a community of library people!

Groups available so far: (Feel free to join any group of interest to you)

We will periodically post messages to the groups with information we find that might be relevant only to a segment of our members, but for the most part these are just for you guys to discuss issues facing you and to network with colleagues!

We will be setting up some other opportunities to network in person, including monthly gatherings when anyone across the system can join us. And our visits to member libraries have been very popular, so starting in 2017 we will be setting up regular visits for groups of interested members to join.

At CMLE Headquarters, we want to provide you with every tool possible to communicate with us and with each other! We are here to help you to be successful, so let us know what we can do to support your work!