8/27/2026 KLAS Users' Roundtable: Bookclubs

Yesterday's session was full of great ideas for both novice and veteran book club presenters.
I highly recommend watch the recording of this session.

Those who attended the session did you find it as informative as I did? Is this a topic you would like to talk more about?

Here are instructions for transferring people by phone to Zoom meetings.

Transferring People into Book Clubs using Zoom
We in Kansas use a Yealink desk phone, but these should work for other desk phones as well. If you use Teams and have a phone number for your meeting, I think you should be able to transfer them by phone as well. Just make sure to do any necessary information input on your end before the final transfer.

1. Call the patron or have them call you.
2. Press the Transfer button on your phone.
a. If you have a consult button, press that then type in the Zoom phone number. Move to next step.
b. If you have just a transfer button, type the Zoom phone number and stay on the line.
3. When you are prompted to enter the Zoom information, use the dial pad to enter the meeting ID and other information if required.
4. Once finished, make sure they are connected. I usually wait until I hear, “You are in the meeting.”
5. Then,
a. If you have a Yealink phone, you may need to hit the back arrow then press the transfer button, otherwise:
b. Hit the transfer button again.
6. Hang up the phone.

Books Clubs from Scratch Response
I also remember what I was going to say in response to Judy Gray's question about how to start a book club from scratch.

Find a book online that already has discussion questions. If you can find something that ties into the summer reading theme, a holiday, or a National Day, that is best so you can hype it up, and it to ties to other things you might be doing at your library. For example, we started our first quarterly book club by tying it into summer reading for which the theme that year was music. We picked DB 74698 The Wrecking Crew: the inside story of rock and roll’s best kept secret by Kent Hartman. It may not gather a lot of patrons at first, but any response to start is great. Then keep going and promote the heck out of it.

Granted, I did have a niche patron group to promote it to to start, but it did grow to others. In December, we do a holiday related book or seasonal book which brought more patrons to participate. The BYO Book is also another great promoter. You could do that as your first meeting and then at it announce that the next meetings are going to be reading specific books and discussing them.