Since early last year, the Library has been delivering learning webinars! You may have attended one of the webinars live, or watched one of our many webinar recordings. If you haven’t had a chance to check out one of our webinars, fear not, there are plenty of opportunities coming up.

The webinar program launched in March 2018, with our first public learning webinar Discover Trove. Since then, the webinars have become a core part of Learning Program, and have reached audiences in all Australian states and territories. As of the beginning of October 2019, we have delivered over 24 webinars!

Our webinars are presented by a huge range of librarians here at the Library, from our family history experts, to our collection librarians who cover their areas of expertise. We focus on delivering webinars that promote the discovery and use of the National Library’s collections and services. Across our webinars, we have explored our catalogue, Trove, eResources, with introductory and more in depth sessions, from Discover Trove to First World War - Telling the Stories of Those Who Served. We’ve got webinars targeted at teachers, librarians, family historians and researchers.

Watching a webinar on a mobile phone

You can take part in our webinars using a wide variety of devices - including your mobile phone!

History

The National Library’s Learning Program originated in 2005, servicing the local community through onsite programming. Since 2012, we have been exploring how best to deliver our programs online, so that the 98% of Australians who live more than two hours from Canberra could attend. The goal of extending the reach of the program beyond the walls of the building, to Australians everywhere, was fundamental to the vision of the Library. We had several years of trial and error, as a lot of online delivery platforms were not suitable for our purposes. There were important considerations around accessibility, technical capacity, and resourcing that could not be easily resolved.

In 2017, it all fell into place, with Zoom providing us with a platform that delivered webinars and provided the functionality we were looking for. After our launch in March 2018, the delivery and program has continued to evolve, as staff respond to attendee feedback and ensure the webinars are accessible to a broad audience.

Delivery - Joining a webinar

All of our webinars are advertised through our events page on our library website. We present, on average, two webinars a month and each webinar covers a different topic. We are constantly developing and presenting new webinars. For example, we have started doing a series of webinars inspired by our Ask a Librarian service, where we ask for questions to be submitted to us prior to the webinar and we then answer those questions live in the webinar.

Missing media item.

Joining a webinar is very straightforward. All you need to do is register through the event page, and an URL is emailed to you to join at the scheduled webinar time. We have a useful page for joining a webinarthat provides you with further information and troubleshooting.

Recordings

And for those webinars that you cannot attend, we record every one and make them available the following day on our YouTube channel, with edited closed captions.

Visit our page Past Webinar Recordings to see all our webinars recordings, and watch them straight away from home.

Our most popular webinar recording is Trove for Family History, which since May last year has over 3000 views! 

Missing media item.

Looking to the future

Since the learning webinars were launched, we have been overwhelmed by the interest and feedback from attendees from all around Australia. We are looking forward to continuing the webinar program and developing sessions that will inspire and delight! So much of the National Library’s resources are at your fingertips and we can show you where to start.

582