Survival of the Fittest: 5 Vital Tips for Virtual Conferences

As I embarked on day one yesterday of the four day Innovative Users Group virtual conference, I was already exhausted. Hot on the heels of last week's three day Southeastern Chapter of the American Association of Law Libraries conference, I am a total mixed bag of emotions and energies. And I know conference season is just getting started... Past posts here at TechScans have given advice for attending conferences and selecting conferences to attend. Those posts were of course specific to in person attendance. In this blog post I hope to share a few tips for surviving the virtual conference universe.

1. Block Out Your Calendar

Block Your Calendar (orange = IUG)

Over the course of 2020 I tried to take full advantage of all the virtual things. Like many people I know, I tried to keep doing all the usual work too (all while working from home with a young child). Some of you out there are still fully working from home, and perhaps you too have children, pets, or other loved ones  you are sharing physical spaces and bandwidth with. In the before times, attending a conference was always a bit of a break. You literally traveled somewhere, be it far or near, and were mostly able to focus on taking in new professional knowledge that would benefit you in your job when you returned. FOCUS is the key word here. Attending a conference virtually, we don't have the same luxury of full focus that we have for face-to-face attendance. Those emails keep coming in, and should you really use an out of office message if you aren't really "out"? If you are virtually attending a conference but are in the office as I am this week, the office phone still rings too. Other meetings are still taking place, because you know, everything is virtual so why not? I recommend going through the entire conference schedule, and as you might have in person, marking the sessions you really must attend. IUG's online schedule allows me to "star" must see sessions so I can more easily find them later. Then I went one step further and copied the session titles and links into my Outlook calendar. Whatever calendar you use, block out the time as if it were a meeting. This will keep you from over-scheduling our double-booking yourself. 

2. Don't Over Work Yourself

Take Breaks Outside If Possible

I've already gone on a bit about the differences in face-to-face and virtual conferences as it relates to scheduling, but one thing I haven't specifically talked about is the time. Seriously, these online conference planners are in a tough spot. In real life, we would all be physically in the same place and therefore all using the same time zone. For IUG I would have been in Detroit, and everyone else would have been too. Accommodating national and international attendees means that sessions will either start too early for the west or run really late for the east (or both). There are also very few if any breaks built into the schedule. Sessions may end at 1:29 and another one begin promptly at 1:30. When the next "room" is only 1 click away to Zoom in or stream a recording that just went live, no one needs a bathroom break or time to walk through the hallway or around a corner to the next session location. With things happening so rapidly and your workday most likely being shifted, I recommend going easy on yourself. Let your colleagues know (one way is block out the calendar!) that you may be physically still working from the same place, but you are in fact attending a conference for some intense professional development. This will keep both yours and their expectations in check. If a session happens 5:30 EST adjust the start of your workday. Bake in some breaks so you are not hunched over a screen for a full day of conference presentations. Be conscious of the amount of time you are working!

3. Take Notes

Virtual IUG Meet & Greet = Great Notes!

Let's be real: are you really going to solely attend the virtual conference and not check your email or do anything else while listening to sessions? This is why note-taking is more important than ever. Sure, you may have taken notes at your last face-to-face conference and of course that was one of the keys to remembering the info you were taking in. But in the virtual conference world, distractions are multiplied rather than subdued. Do your best to silence notifications during presentations, and start a brand new steno pad or word doc for the conference. In advance, give each page the title, date and time of the session. If you must give into various distractions during any given session, your notes will help you get back on track. If you are lucky enough to have sessions provided on demand rather than just live streamed your notes will also help out when you return to the session recordings to play catch up. Virtual exhibit halls are another place where taking notes are critical. In real life you may have walked away from the vendor booths with a bag full of random goodies! Each one would have helped you remember that particular booth and what they talked about. For this section of your conference notes, I recommend taking screen captures and saving them to a folder, or if your conference "notepad" is a Word or Google doc, pasting them into the doc along with a few notes.

4. Network

#IUG2021 Badge

One of the things I have learned time and time again from more experienced librarians is that conferences and annual meetings are where networking happens. An excellent tip I picked up a few years back was to exchange 5 business cards with people you have never met before. This was a good goal for the before times. Normally you would use this goal to help you meet new colleagues from other institutions who have similar interests or job responsibilities. Later you would return to your colleagues post conference and share who you met and what you learned. This type of professional experience can still occur in the online environment, but it looks very different than meetups between sessions (because there is very little "between session" time as #2 in this post pointed out). If your online conference allows for attendee profiles, bio photos or conference badges fill it out. This will help you take full advantage of the other aspects of their online offerings. Some virtual conferences like IUG have "social feed", "birds of a feather", chat and forum sections. In addition to live-tweeting about your virtual conference experience, these non-public locations provide several ways for you to connect informally with others attending the same presentations, working with the same systems, or trying to solve the same problems in their libraries. Attendees are posting photos of their home or work office spaces, talking about what they would have done if they really were in Detroit, and sharing their general feelings in a few sentences or with a pic or two about the virtual experience. Your interactions within the various sections of the site will be connected to your "badge" the same way that physical name tag or business card served as a leave-behind. Since you have the benefit of being on a computer while attending virtual networking events like a meet and greet or happy hour, in place of getting a business card ask in the chat for email addresses, and connect with those individuals on LinkedIn.

5. Dress Down & Dine In

Conference Cat & Hat

Perhaps one of my favorite parts of before times conferences was deciding what to wear, observing the conference-style of other librarians, and of course dining out! Who doesn't love trying new food? Virtual conferences might be stressful in totally new and frightening ways, but three silver linings for me have been:

A. How we dress: pajama pants and hooded sweatshirt? cat-face baseball hat? house shoes all day?

B. Where we "Zoom" in from: your couch? a picnic blanket outdoors? with your cat in your lap?

C. What we eat: ice cream instead of continental breakfast? sushi take out? warm cup of noodles?

However you choose to dress and whatever you have for dinner, I won't be the judge! I do encourage you to take advantage of the creature comforts that virtual conferencing allows. Who knows how long this aspect of our professional development lives will last. In the very least, treat yourself to at least one meal of something different. If the conference would have been in a location known for a certain type of cuisine, give that a shot (and use this as a conversation starter when you try tip #4). 

Cat House Shoes = Perfect Conference Footwear

 

What do you love or loathe about virtual conferences? What do you miss about face-to-face? Do you have any tips to share for surviving the online versions? Share with us in the comments!

From Cancellations to Coding: Pandemic-Centered Tech Topics on Day Two of the OBS/TS Summit 2020

So far, day two of the summit has delivered fantastic programming. I wish I could attend it all! The final virtual event takes place at 6 PM EST tonight. This morning my two favorite sessions both dealt with the new realities we are living in post COVID-19 closures, touching on this from the perspective of budget cuts to work from home workarounds. Here were my takeaways:

Top Left to Bottom Right: Gilda Chiu-Ousland, Wendy Moore, Heather Buckwalkter, Anne Lawless-Collins.

TS Resource Management Roundtable: Budget Cuts & Collecting Pivots
I was really on the fence about which of the earliest morning sessions to attend, and I am so glad I selected this one on resource management and collecting pivots. Wendy Moore from the University of Georgia Law Library led the discussion with a powerful statement that really summarizes the entire roundtable and the timeliness of the topics:

"Crisis can lead to LOTS of creativity."

What followed were introductions from each of the panelists including Heather Buckwalter, Gilda Chiu-Ousland, and Anna Lawless-Collins. Each shared the state of things at their institution, the fallout from COVID-19 closures including the stopping of shipments and the addition of online study aids and other e-resources to help students and faculty get through a quick pivot to virtual learning, and the budget (if they had %'s or figures yet) that they are each facing for fiscal year 2021 and 2022. This session (as with several from day one of the summit) was not recorded to allow attendees to feel more comfortable sharing the details and situations of their library, law school, or larger institution. Two polls were executed in the larger Zoom room before dividing into smaller groups for more personalized and in depth discussions. The polls were very interesting, revealing many of us still do not know our budget, or have vague %'s that are yet to be approved, and that the majority of us are cutting print journals more than any other area of our collections.


In the smaller groups, attendees were better able to share their own situations, including some very creative strategies for how to negotiate with vendors, what data they are using to make those decisions about what and how to cut items from the collection, and what they have already or are planning to cancel to meet the demands of the coming fiscal year. There was a big focus on mitigating expectations of faculty and other stakeholders, and many were open about having these difficult conversations with their faculty members related to monograph acquisitions and with their institutions related to print course reserve materials. Overall an excellent program that was really open to sharing their situations so we can all learn from one another and continue best serving our library users.

Hot Topic: Technologies We Use

Presented by Jesse Lambertson, this session was more of an open discussion than a straight-forward presentation. Sharing his own library system as the beginning example, Lambertson pitched questions to the audience with lively responses in real time and invited members to un-mute and speak to their specific system challenges in the work from home environment. It was really interesting to hear individuals sharing the pros and cons of their various integrated library system platforms once they were catapulted into teleworking. The clear up-side to having a web-based interface was the ease that these librarians and their staff could quickly pivot to working from home without the hassle of using VPN or requiring remote desktop. These included those using TIND and Alma to name a couple. Several of us still working with iii's Sierra were able to join in chorus about our struggles in working from home with spotty VPN support and the differences in Sierra web as compared to the desktop client.

Presenter Jesse Lambertson screen shares Python script snippets hack for working with CSV data.

For importing and exporting records, both individually or in batches, many hacks were shared including creative ways use Marc Edit when working from home and the potential for more API's between Marc Edit and the ILS. It is of course that time of year when we are all gathering statistics. With much overlap from the previous session I attended, many of us commented we are accessing collection and user data much more right now to better inform decision making in a time of budget cuts. As a result, further roadblocks and workflow workarounds were discussed for various systems. Several attendees shared how they query their system for cataloging and other statistics, the issues they experience in the format of the data they pull out, and the obstacles that come with trying to do this type of work from home or with very limited access to the library. Many individuals (myself included!) are periodically retrieving data from their systems, exporting it at txt or csv files, and then taking it home on laptops of flash drives to be able to spend more time with it when teleworking. However, and few shared more innovative approaches to both massaging data as well as collecting and sharing it. Lambertson shared a highly creative approach using Python scripts to automate certain aspects of the csv to Excel conversion of his data. Another attendee shared their library's customized Google Sheets dashboard which pulls data from the ILS into the same location as reference transactions statistics (populated by Google Form responses). A truly fantastic session with lots of open dialogue between attendees. I am so glad I attended and I can't wait to see and hear how the experiential system and data approaches our members are working with now unfold in the coming months and years as access to our offices and systems remains largely unknown during a pandemic.

Functioning at Lightspeed: Day One of the OBS/TS Summit 2020 & Linked Data in Libraries Conference

Screenshot from the Summit's OBS-SIS Business Meeting

Seriously, how fast is time going by these days? It seems like just yesterday I was attending the Work Smarter Not Harder Technical Services virtual conference from Amigos in mid-February, but here we are at the end of July on the heels of AALL 2020! Today the first ever summit of our two special interest sections is literally happening as I type this blog post. I could not contain my excitement for the topics covered so far, and felt compelled to go ahead and blog about two of the sessions. To find out more about the summit schedule which is still underway, (including business meetings too!) visit the AALL Calendar item. A big announcement from the OBS-SIS business meeting is that the official name of the SIS was voted to change to "Library Systems and Resource Discovery"! Now without delay, here are my two favorites with takeaways:

• Facilitating Open Knowledge: The Intersection of Wikidata and Libraries - Presenters shared how "inter-collectional connections broaden the experience to go into parallel and related items". What a fantastic summary of Linked Data, and Wikidata in particular. The hyperlink for this session title will take you to the slides which I highly recommend saving as a resource if you are interested in more Wikidata. Many slides gave specific examples of using Wikidata for legal faculty scholarship.  Of course it was noted in the session and from commenters in the Q&A that "we’re in the wild west days of wikidata (just like wikipedia used to be - it is very community based)." When considering Wikidata, remember that most things in wikipedia are in wiki data, but it is not always true the other way around. The discussion following the presentation focused heavily on "notability". Presenters made sure to comment that Wikidata allows you to create entries for faculty members that might not make it into Wikipedia. Questions were asked like "is just being a faculty member enough notability to be in Wikidata?" But the goal here is to build a robust citation network in Wikidata, adding items to support structure and more. One problem discussed what that not all language versions of Wikipedia have embraced Wikidata (yet) so the benefit of Wikidata is not across the board. Presenters also shared about a new Wiki-project called Wiki abstract which hopes to dynamically pull summaries from Wikidata). The biggest takeaway was “Notability (wikidata) is not the same as bibliographic warrant (authority control - NACO)”.
• Finding the Silver Lining in System Migrations -  What I discovered at the end of this session was that it was originally intended as a large face-to-face program in new Orleans had the AALL annual meeting and conference not gone virtual. It was planned to be a platform-neutral panel with speakers from a variety of law libraries talking about their migrations. As a result of things going virtual, this smaller session amd the one following it (Hot Topic/Local Systems Committee Meeting Making Post System Migration Efficient and Effective") covered the same terrain in two slices. There were so many takeaways from this session that I can't possibly share them all here, and even though the two speakers talked primarily about their library platforms, their joint experiences with systems and the discussion from attendees still rounded the session out to include a vareity of platforms including iii to alma, aleph, tind, wms, folio, sirsi, etc. A few of my favorite quotes and lessons from the presenters included:
• You have to always look out for other people (not just the records you touch)
• Always draw on the experience of people at other institutions who migrated before you, and don't be afraid to ask them "Please help me! How did you do this?"
• You’ve got to build your own team. There’s the team you are forced to be part of (your department, your library, your university, your consortium) and then your own external team. That is the team you can build yourself, where you can gather info about the migration process from those at other institutions, and share it with others like you later after you have gone through it. 
• Carve out management and leadership opportunities for staff and other librarians  using migration as the backbone, since it is such a major effort, it can be a milestone for any individual's professional growth and take them further in their career. 
• Turn it into a bootcamp (like a mini 2 day conference) where you are migrating from one platform to another. Invite others in your area going through the same process (example was a DC area libraries migrating from Sierra to Alma). 
• Know that other things may have to be sacrificed along the way. You will not survive migration if you try to do everything you have always done during a migration (or any other major project). If you’re the manager, you should be shielding your team from the onslaught of "all the things" during a big migration.
• If you keep trying to do it all you will not do any of it very well...and you may not make it. You have to think about prioritizing things in advance. What will you stop or delay to get the new, major work done? 
• 3 years out and many are STILL cleaning up post-migration data messes. But it becomes the new normal… so it will be OK!
• Get to know and use your university IT department as much as you can. That has been more helpful for people migrating than their law school's IT when there is not an ILS expert in your library or a true systems librarian at your library. 
• Negotiate with staff and librarians to parse out what they really want and need to know how to do (you may need to reference interview the reference librarians!)
• Host a series of in-person if you can (or virtual if you can't) sessions to show staff and librarians how to do all the things they need for workflows as a live demo.
• Keep track of your training offerings and other documentation so you can show you did your due diligence for your library.

Also still currently happening throughout this week is TONS of programming from the Linked Data in Libraries 2020 Conference. The entire slate of sessions have been FREE to attend! You can find the schedule including links to the sessions in sched. You can also find all completed session recordings in the YouTube LD4 2020 playlist. I'm going to embed that below, but first my favorite session (so far) was today's "Linked Data for Sound" session. This excellent live program presented the work of Bethany Radcliff of the University of Texas in Austin. She talked about AudiAnnotate, and shared all of the resources related to the project. The session slides are available online, which include links to GitHub and all of the other pieces of this project. It was fascinating to hear how Bethany is using Linked Data in a practical way to make audio more accessible. The tool is also being used by professors as a teaching tool for literary criticism. Part of Bethany's resources realted to AudiAnnotate include short virtual workshops that show you how to download and use Audactiy (one of my personal favorite free audio editing tools!) to make annotations to audio of all kinds. The discussion was interesting and robust too, with attendees speculating how the tool could be expanded and adapted for video, or for non-traditional audio recordings like bird songs. The conversations and discussions are continuing throughout this week on LD4 2020's slack channel. Join in if you can, and watch the wide variety of sessions (there are 46 videos and counting!!) that already have recordings available in YouTube below: