Thanks to all who gathered for yesterday’s town hall, the first in our Economic Tough Times focus for the month. We’ll be gathering again on December 12 and December 18 to keep tackling the issues and experimenting with this exciting new format, the virtual town hall.

We started the session with a poll to decide which areas to discuss, and as you can see from the poll’s results, the topic is *huge* and the group wanted to discuss just about everything related to libraries in economic tough times:

We did try to focus on the top 3 poll winners (hottest topic: Demonstrating Impact), but as you can imagine there was plenty of overlap, because you can’t talk about funding without talking about how to demonstrate your value to funders and taxpayers, and you can’t talk about staff training without talking about increased demands on staff. You can view the archive, a new pathfinder, and lots of discussions on these hot topics in a brand new Group: Tough Times. The town hall was just the beginning of the discussion and community building around the topic, so be sure to join the group and jump in with your own questions and strategies.

I’ve started 3 discussions myself with these excellent questions from the first town hall:

• How do we deal with the increased demands on libraries? And what are they?
• How do we, through training, increase staff capacity and learning to have the tools to meet the growing demands?
• How do we prioritize all of the work related to increased demands, and building awareness to community and partners?

We got some great feedback on how to tweak the format for next time, namely that we need to focus the topics, but everyone was very excited to see that the format works well and we can look forward to future WebJunction Virtual Town Halls on topics that are important to you! See you at the next Town Hall…