Colleagues from three public library services will be sharing their experiences of developing creative digital activity for their communities during lockdown. They will be describing how they planned the programme, the impact their activities have had and will reflect on skills used/needed and other lessons learned.

We will then invite the audience and panel to discuss how as public libraries reopen, digital programmes can be part of a new blended offer. The Webinar will close with an invitation to take part in a digital Bootcamp in the autumn.

Speakers:

Marion Tessier from Kingston Libraries Service who will share their experience of creating and delivering a full programme of online events (about 250 videos of original content) with a mixture of live streams and interactive events.

Janet Westcott, Katy Vaughn and Liam O’Hara from Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole (BCP) Libraries will talk about the development of their digital resources on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. They will discuss the process, benefits and challenges involved in producing video content for the corporate BCP YouTube channel, covering the ways in which they filmed content and distributed it to their library customers. Liam has previously worked as library assistant at the Arts University Bournemouth and has been a full-time library assistant at Poole Central Library for two years. He has written and directed corporate video content in a freelance capacity for businesses in the UK and Norway, was funded as part of the 2016 BFI NET.WORK/Creative England iShorts slate and was a part of 2019s BAFTA crew development programme. Janet is the Reader Development Librarian for BCP Libraries and, in normal times, coordinates the library service’s What’s On programme. Through lockdown she has worked with a talented team to bring some of these events and activities online.

David Kell has worked for Bury Libraries and Archives for the last 10 years. He started in the social inclusion team as a community development officer, and now supervises two of our locations. During lockdown David ran a series of isolation podcasts, with some incredible guests, including video chats for World Book Night, and took their weekly rhyme time sessions to Facebook live.

Digital events in public libraries: learning from our lockdown experiences