Adventures in Online Mentoring: The New Members' Roundtable Career Mentoring Program

Many programs for mentoring of librarians exist within organizations, for specific areas of librarianship, or for particular groups of librarians. These programs generally depend on face-to-face contact and some organizational commonalities or similarity in positions. With the advent of online communication, could a more general program matching up new librarians and ALA members with experienced librarians for online mentoring be feasible? ALA's New Members' Round-table Mentoring Committee coordinated a new project to find out. This article outlines the planning process and the mechanics of the program through two iterations. Feedback received from participants was mixed but provided valuable insight into what could make a wholly online mentoring program work. (Contains 9 notes.)