For today, I got to jump on a Zoom for part of my shift to oversee an online manga book club. Due to Covid and the preferences of the patrons, the meeting is still going online, but our Supervisor wants to transition back to in-person once the library construction is done. One of the reasons for it is to stimulate in-person connection, which will help develop better relationships between staff and patrons—something that's genuinely harder to build through a screen when people have their cameras off or are multitasking in another tab.
This Zoom had about 4 people, which is a little light, but it was nice that people actually showed up and were engaged with the book. The patrons chose "Traveling to Mars" for September, and people were surprisingly in agreement on what they liked and disliked about it. What made it work was that they started bouncing off each other's observations—one person would mention something about the art style, and someone else would connect it to a plot point they'd noticed. Really glad this time the patrons were more engaging instead of last time, which had a lot of dead silence and awkward pauses where I was scrambling to come up with discussion prompts. It's interesting how much the energy of these clubs depends on whether people come prepared to talk or are just there passively. I'm curious to see how the dynamic shifts if we do eventually move in-person—whether the same people will show up or if the format change will attract a different crowd entirely.
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