What is the library?
The SessionLab library is a collection of facilitation methods, activities and techniques you can add to your sessions and edit for your needs.
The library is composed of workshop activities from experts who have shared their best methods in the SessionLab public library. You’ll find resources from Hyper Island, Thiagi Group, International Association of Facilitators, Liberating Structures, MediaLab Amsterdam and Gamestorming, to name just a few.
You’ll also find methods from individuals who have submitted their own resources to the public library. The SessionLab library is an ever-growing and evolving collection of free content created by the facilitation community that you’re able to use when building your agenda.
Using the library
The public library is designed to help you wherever you are in your session design process.
If your workshop or meeting is nearing completion and you know that you need an icebreaker or some variation on a dot voting exercise and want to find a specific method, use the in-session library search to pull a method directly into your session.
If you want to explore the library in detail and filter by categories like team building or problem solving methods, navigating to the library page directly is your best bet. Here, you can see methods grouped by categories and you can filter based on keywords or popularity. You can also expand a method by clicking on its card. Here you’ll see the full details for the method, including suggested duration, number of participants, and complete instructions.
The search bar will search for resources based on your keyword and provide all the library resources that contain it in their description. You can also search based on a specific category by either clicking on the tag (such as #innovation or #liberating structures) or by entering it directly into the search bar.
When you click on the ‘Use’ button on any method you can then select the session you want to add this method to, and then it will appear as a block in your session in the ‘Notes’ area.
Once you’ve found your chosen method you can then drag and drop the block into your session and hey presto, it’s ready to go! From there, you can edit the timing, amend the Description or Additional information fields or modify the method as you see fit.
If you find any resource in the library that you would like to save for later, you can mark it as a favorite by clicking on the heart icon. These are added to the ‘My favorites’ section of the library, so you can develop your own collection of methods for later reuse or review.
In addition to adding a method as a favorite, you can also choose to rate the method and / or leave a comment on it, assign a 1 to 5-star rating to the method (5 stars means best!) or leave a comment on the method. Both the rating and commenting functionality is available at the bottom of the library card.
Setting up your private or shared library
Once you’ve grown comfortable using SessionLab, you might find that you’ve created blocks you want to reuse in future sessions or share with collaborators. In SessionLab, you can have your own private set of methods to make this part of the design process easy!
If you’re on a multi-seat Pro plan, you also have a shared library to share methods with all the members of your workspace.
You can add a block to your private or shared library while working on a session. If you choose to add this block to your personal library – it will be visible only to you in the ‘Methods I created’ view of the library – or you can add it to the library of any workspace you are a member of.
If you’re a team leader gathering a set of resources you’d like your team to use in future sessions, this is a great way to collect them together and speed up the co-creation process.
You can also add a new method from scratch to your private or shared library directly from the library page.
Remember that you have complete control over the library methods you create!
All content you create in your private library is private by default.
All content you create in your shared library is viewable only by other members of that team by default
If you want to share some of the blocks you’ve made to the public library so they can be used by others in the community? Adding resources to the public library is not only a great way to give back to the community but to put yourself on the map as a facilitator and share best practices.
SessionLab really comes to life when using the Session Planner and library together. Adding methods to your private or team library for both yourself and your collaborators is a surefire way to increase productivity, share resources effectively and speed-up your design process.