Negotiating With Speakers

Meet Marsh William Hambrook (1805-1874)  my immigrant ancestor, and by necessity, a pretty fair hand at negotiating a deal, especially to obtain a good horse. Those bargaining skills  are often neglected in our credit card society but are very useful if you are shopping for talented speakers, workshop leaders etc for your library or  genealogical society. Here’s what I mean.

Genealogy Classes as a Member Recruitment Tool

In my travels in the west I have encountered many inovative ideas in genealogy education. While speaking at a conference in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan I heard about a genealogy society with some creative thinkers and teachers. As a group they offered a beginnig genealogy class in the local night school program.

Tips for Program Planners from my Experiences

If you are involved in doing program and event planning for your local , regional or other genealogical society, you might benefit from the speaker’s experiences that follow. I invite you to read and take note.

What Can You Learn from an Old Program Brochure? Gen Ed @ the Library

Today I stumbled on an old program brochure from a series of genealogy lectures I organized at Regina Public Library a few years ago.Neither the series offerings nor the brochure text are perfect. Therefore they are a good place to start in thinking about a similar lecture series. As you read this, realize this is a lecture series, not a class. Consider the following questions:

1. Do the lectures fit into a logical progression/?
2. Is the redundant information useful or a distraction?
3. Do the titles reflect content as described?
4. Do the topics fit the series for beginners? for intermediate learners?
5. Would you attend?

Workshop Registration and Pre-workshop Learner Assessments

For a few days now i have been wanting to comment on these two issues, workshop registration and pre-workshop learner assessment. These are two tasks that are occuring somewhere on th continent as we speak. Local societies hosting events know just how hard smooth registrations are to attain. And speakers and teachers desperately need to learn more about how to get the pre-assessment info early enough to make meaningful adjustments to course/worshop content. There is help on the web for both of these tasks. Let’s look at these.

Can your program evaluation form be a marketing tool?

I came across this idea on SpeakerNet News the other day. The suggestion was to put a question like, “I’d like to learn more about ______.” That seems like a pretty simple idea.

Transcribing and Abstracting Documents

One of my greaat pleasures in working for the National Institute for Genealogical Studies is the consultations i have with students. My students in Analysis and Skills Mentoring 2 and 3 struggle through transcription and abstracting assignments. Some I am sure will never tackle such tasks again, and neverrise to the great potential they have as genealogists of professional quality. These skills are critical for advanced research.