ACRL’s Distance Learning Section had a virtual poster session in April, which believe it or not was actually planned back in January!  I was REALLY impressed with it, and as a virtual attendee I found it very engaging, as anyone could comment on the posters and thus talk with presenters/other viewers almost in real time.  Presenters could create p…[Read more]

I attended NASIG a few months ago, and their approach was to let vendors present in a lightning round session.  I appreciated this approach, as I personally don’t really have the institutional means to have worthwhile one-on-one engagement with vendors,  but still benefit a lot from being able to see what the latest products and trends are.  I th…[Read more]

The Society for American Music (SAM) held a very successful online conference in 2020. They did everything via Zoom and it all went really well. The Texas Music Library Association and AMS-Southwest just held a great Zoom meeting over three days.  For that one, everyone was asked to make recordings of their presentations that could be played from…[Read more]

The ability to make appointments and to try out electronic resources (maybe short trial period logins, like some vendors already distributed in the past) are important. Also useful would be time window (s) with an open room (like Zoom, but whatever platform) where I could drop in for discussion with vendors but also having colleagues in the room -…[Read more]

Leslie McCall shared with me some communication about things NASIG is doing to promote participation and access to their upcoming virtual event:

In addition to our synchronous event, many of our other presenters will be recording their talks for on-demand viewing. We will encourage discussion of these events on the NASIG website. The entire…

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Thanks, Marci. This is an intriguing format.

ACRL 2019 used the platform ipostersessions.com for both their in-person posters and to make the materials available afterwards. I don’t know anything on the tech or pricing side. Our head of instruction attended the conference then shared links to select posters for discussion among all our instruction librarians.

Here’s an…[Read more]

This may be up to the Program Committee, but we might consider expanding the idea of what constitutes a “poster” since presenters often include audiovisual kiosks or slideshows in addition to the static display. I don’t have a poster in mind, but it might be challenging (possibly in a good way) to arrange certain types of displays to fit the…[Read more]

We’re keeping an eye on it, but the costs are so very different that they’re not very comparable as financial models. That said, seeing the success of virtual chapter meetings has been very informative, and these meetings show how stimulating and interactive virtual meetings can be.

In addition to breakout rooms or other virtual space that could be part of MLA’s meeting platform, services also exist that create virtual exhibit halls. The latter firms resemble in some ways the convention services firms that MLA knows from the ways it shapes physical meeting spaces. It may be useful to explore the virtual exhibit hall services…[Read more]

Depending on platform used for virtual meeting, breakout rooms might be a good venue for interactions with vendors. Ideally, conference attendees would have the choice to pick which vendors they want to interact with, but this could be a random assignment as well.

I also think that short vendor presentations (pre-recorded videos) could be made…[Read more]

+1 for Mark’s idea of pre-recorded videos

Will MLA be monitoring the modality of Chapter meetings to consider how to hold the 2021 Annual Meeting?

“images of candy” makes me wish we had a Like button here.

Thanks for the great ideas, Mark!

I think that, online or in person, there might be a pre-recorded video with a brief presentation of the topic (maybe maxxing out at 3-5 minutes).  If we are in person, this would allow others to target those poster sessions for which they have questions or further feedback (and that feedback loop could be added to the initial video too, I…[Read more]