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! Continue reading Let's talk! CMLE Google Groups, and more →