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!

Power Projects for Quarantined Librarians

Some of us are approaching the two month mark of our library's closure to the public. Though it has definitely had ups and downs, I have found it has helped me better carve out time for professional development activities, dedicate more of my day to clean-up projects I have just not had time to follow through on, and even start new projects with the help of colleagues who found themselves needing a little more to do from home. On the heels of Travis' post about transitioning technical services staff to working from home, I hope this post will elaborate on that topic to give specific project examples for those working in collection services, technical services, or metadata and archives related positions.

ILS Database Maintenance
Projects of this nature could range from starting, continuing or finishing the cleanup of small or large sets of records.

• Complete outstanding cleanup projects a for smaller sets of records. For me, a cleanup I started last fall (LL.M. Theses Collection) which I previously blogged about was the first on the chopping block.
• Facilitate the cleanup of collections, like course reserves, for other departments. Our role was simply to assist by creating lists, then formatting those in Excel. Access services staff can use that list to check for faculty members no longer with our institution, and then remove the instructor and those related reserve item records from the ILS.
• Learn more about your system and the tools you can use to better care for it. There is no shortage of webinars right now. In addition to system specific sessions, there are many free sessions focusing on record management or data tools. Some of my favorites have been Terry Reese's "MarcEdit Shelter-In-Place Webinars". The latest one, number 6, is on regular expressions.

IR Micro & Macro Clean-up
Repositories like our own in Digital Commons have issues similar to those inherent to long-standing ILS's: without regular care and feeding, the structure becomes less organized and the data for records less consistent.

• Review your repository site map and make big picture structural adjustments. Our IR has been around since 2006, and many of our earlier events (like conferences and symposium) were added before we adopted using the event types. As a result, all "events" before a certain date were actually article-type records, and all of the "events" after that certain date had completely different series structures as well as different metadata fields. To resolve this some time was spent almost manually moving the articles over, one by one, to give them the appropriate fields in their new home. It has taken lots of effort, but in the end it will make all the difference in the discoverability of events of the same series. For more info on this topic, see a previous blog post about IR Metadata.
• Harvest digital media to expand your individual item content. Similar to the LL.M. Theses collection cleanup mentioned above, last fall another colleague and I began a collaborative project to use scripts to capture all of the metadata and publicly hosted digital-born image files from our law school website into spreadsheets of data. Using these spreadsheets after a little minor formatting of the cells I can now batch load the images pretty quickly. Though this work is still in progress, it has been a perfect project for both my colleague and I to tele-work on since the repository and the website are each accessible from home.
• Learn more about your system. The BrightTalk Digital Commons sessions have been wonderful to watch both live and recorded versions of (learning more about native streaming has really come in handy!), and many of the past CALICon sessions which are all freely available as videos online have also been great sources of learning how others are using repositories and what else we can do with our own IR.

Cataloging Collections & Archives 
Be it physical items, special collections, or virtual equivalents, the building being closed has not stopped the number of items that need our attention. Even without new items, existing items can always use accessibility makeovers!

• Archive virtual events. As we all know, although some events have been cancelled completely due to closures, most have opted to go virtual in one way or another. At our law school, faculty colloquium have continued occurring in Zoom, and even a conference was hosted entirely online (with more attendance than our physical space could have accommodated). I have continued collecting materials for archiving these events both for when I return to add to the physical special collections, and to add them as I normally would to our repository "conferences" series. In the absence of printed programs, I have saved PDF "prints" of email programs, and instead of photographs of the room or panelists in real life, I have taken screen captures of Zoom rooms at the highest quality my computer will allow.

Thumbs of 15 photos of book spines for a colleague.

• Catalog items from home. I did not have too many outstanding items to catalog when I left the office to set up my home workspace. The items that I did have, I brought with me in a small box. Most ILS have a web-browser accessible entry point, and although I cannot complete all of my tasks from home (like data exchange) I can still catalog! I was able to catch up on a few items this way, and honestly spend more time doing detailed original cataloging that I might have rushed through in the office. As one of the essential employees (those physical backup tapes don't change themselves!) I have been able to grab a couple more items as needed on my brief but weekly run into the office. For those colleagues not coming into the office at all, I've taken photographs of items to share with them so they can continue their work from home, even without the items in hand.
• Make items more accessible. This could take lots of forms. One project we are excited is finally underway is the OCR-ing of hundreds of already digitized documents. The PDFs were not text-searchable, but thanks to one staff member and a couple of librarians we have created a very effective workflow and are making great progress to provide more accessibility and in turn discoverability to archival collections like student directories, law school magazines, and historical strategic plans. Transcription is another option if you have more audio or video content. It can be tedious but the effort goes a long way to making items available to a wider audience online. Marketing your collections and archives is another way to share them with the world. Blog for your library about physical items to help patrons or the public feel more at home, even from a distance. In doing so I've used it as an opportunity to get to know our archives better. Advertise your digitally available collections through organizations at the state, regional or national level. Everyone is searching for free educational content right now, so share what you have to offer. Many org's have made calls for this type of content to spotlight, and others will probably thank you for sending ideas their way. 

Using Adobe Acrobat Pro on Law School issued laptops, collection services staff could batch enhance scans and perform optical character recognition (OCR) to make PDFs text-searchable.

 
Professional Growth & Contributions
If you are still finding yourself, your colleagues or supervisee's lacking things to do, sign up for a course, attend a webcast, document your projects and turn them into articles or presentations.

• There is no end to organizations sharing webinars online right now. Even if you cannot fit all of the live events into your teleworking schedule (for some reason many of them have taken place at the same time, and in the same platforms!) you can still register for them to receive access to recording links later. In addition to the links I shared above, I've also really enjoyed the two courses I took over the last two weeks from Midwest Collaborative for Library Services. It never hurts to refresh your memory of certain topics that you might not have had dedicated attention to give since library school, or to learn something brand new! 
• Document everything. Each time I begin to make progress on a new special project, or fine tune a workflow at my institution, I approach documentation as if I were going to present it later as a conference session, workshop, or article. With many conferences announcing they are going virtual, it has never been a better time to submit proposals without the hesitation of travel logistics. If you have never published before, now may be the time to share how you did that certain something with a journal or in your organization or SIS newsletter. The opportunities are limitless, so keep that in mind no matter what projects you are undertaking. 

Quick Question: What conferences should I attend?

It feels like every week or two I receive an email promoting a conference to attend. With limited budget and a desire to attend conferences centered around issues related to technical services and resource management, I reached out to the TS and OBS-SIS listservs for recommendations. Keep reading to discover your next favorite conference outside of the AALL Annual Meeting.

Stay local

• Check out your local chapter of the American Association of Law Libraries for their annual meeting. Chapters tend to have more programs relevant to TS and OBS librarians.
• Look for regional TS-based workshops or conferences. If you're a Northern California resident, check out the Northern California Technical Processes Group (NCTPG)
• Your local ALA chapter may also have an annual conference with a technical services or library systems track.

ILS Conferences

• Innovative Users Group (IUG)
• Regional Innovative user groups also host their own conferences.
• ExLibris Users of North America (ELUNA) 
• Regional ExLibris user groups also host their own conferences.
• Another ExLibris resource to check out is the Alma Law Library Special Interest Group. This group meets annually at ELUNA, and also has an active listserv.

E-Resource Management Conferences

• North American Serials Group (NASIG)
• Focuses on serials and electronic resources management.
• Budget friendly: this conference is less expensive than a lot of other conferences - yay!
• Many of our colleagues recommend this annual conference, so you can count on meeting some TS/OBS-SIS folks!
• Electronic Resources and Libraries (ER&L)
• Held annually in March in Austin, Texas and online.
• The conference is organized into tracks/subtopics, so it's easy to see if there is an area of interest to you.

Other great recommendations

• Charleston Conference: Issues in book and serial acquisitions
• Held every year in Charleston, S.C., the Charleston Conference is devoted to technical services, electronic resources, serials, etc.
• This conference is recommended by many of our colleagues.
• Computers in Libraries 
• Held annually in Arlington, Virginia
• Focus on emerging and leading-edge technology. Great place to network with other information professionals from a variety of library backgrounds.
• Acquisitions Institute at Timberline Lodge 
• Geared towards acquisitions and collection development librarians
• Single-track conference with limited enrollment.
• Society of American Archivists (SAA)
• Joint annual meeting of the Council of State Archivists and the Society of American Archivists 
• Special Libraries Association (SLA)
• Focused on special libraries and information professionals. 
• Explores trends in knowledge and information management.

Is your favorite conference missing? Leave your recommendations in a comment below!

Reflections from CALICon19: Two Best Sessions

Looking out over downtown Columbia, SC #CALICon19

Some talk has been floating around in My Communities for covering conferences that may relate to TS, OBS and even CS members. There is understandably a lot of variation in many member job duties and with that plenty of room for overlap of these SIS individuals. Coming from an I.T. department position before my current role this makes total sense, and I can see the benefit to many of us not only having backgrounds in computer science and other technical fields, but also the advantages to continuing education in those areas as library professionals. This is where CALICon comes in.

With Web Developer Leslie Grove at CALICon19

Many of us are familiar at least in some way with CALI the organization (a.k.a. Computer Assisted Legal Instruction). They provide our law students with extremely helpful study aids, plus have resources that help faculty members with all sorts of things. Librarians fit into this section of folks CALI has resources for too. I first heard of CALICon a few years ago when my friend and web developing office-mate Leslie flew to Denver, CO to co-present with our Information Technology Librarian Jason. Their talk titled "Enough to be Dangerous: 00000110 Things Every Beginner Needs to Know about Coding", gave a snapshot of the main programming language fundamentals to the varied CALICon audience. What a neat conference I thought at the time. I had only been to either Drupal Camps full of I.T. guys or state librarian conferences which were full-on librarian attendees, and the idea of a conference that brought librarians, tech-heads and faculty together sounded... well downright phenomenal!

A couple years later I lucked into CALICon coming to Atlanta. Being in Athens, GA it was a short drive. I presented on infographics, and realized I was right - CALICon is pretty amazing. The unique mixture of attendee's makes for interesting discussion and highly useful content that naturally lends itself to collaborative relationships. In true tech-event fashion CALICon live streams all of the sessions and at hyper-speed uploads them all for streaming on YouTube. So, if you have never been to CALICon before, I encourage you to consider it next year. One only has to browse the CALICon playlists of session videos to wonder why everyone doesn't attend.

This brings me to my top 2 sessions from #CALICon19 which I felt would be most useful to  TechScans followers:

• Leveraging eResources for Affordable Course Materials - Mary and Lisa were excellent presenters who didn't just share something cool (maybe their topic wasn't the flashiest on the schedule) but certainly brought one of the more relevant sessions for me throughout CALICon's two-day whirlwind. What institution isn't interested in saving money for their law students? What library doesn't grapple with ways to make things more cost-effective? This session not only discussed measures that would greatly benefit students but also ideas for faculty members who want to publish their own course content. In this session I learned about lulu.com (CALI actually uses them to publish their books! SUPER affordable, 600+ page books for around $25 shipped!), Powernotes, H20 open casebook platform and more. The presenters even shared strategies for liaising with your registrar office and faculty members to offer alternatives before or alongside booklists, and how they reviewed their own booklists from past semesters to locate and suggest cost-saving measures for specific courses. 

John Presents at CALICon19

• Automating Processing and Intake in the Institutional Repository with Python - Wow, just wow is all I could say after this session. Most of us deal with our IR in some form or another. As my own role with our Digital Commons site continues to increase, I went into this session with high hopes and seated next to our law school web developer (the office-mate mentioned before), and we were not disappointed. If you have ever manually entered items into your own IR one at a time as I typically do, you smile at the prospect of batch loading. With a large project of archiving old photos in our own IR looming I have been postponing preparing my own spreadsheets - I know it will be tedious and a worm hole of a project. After John's session I am SO glad I waited. My colleague, the coding goddess, and I sat in awe of the automation John was sharing. I was pleasantly rejuvenated leaving the session with a collaborative game plan which I am happy to say we are already making great progress on. Although the presenter's project was with Law Journals and pulling content from PDF's, our own is actually much simpler since we are pulling titles, image URLs and (hopefully) basic descriptions. By far this session left me feeling the most excited about returning to work with something we could instantly put to use.

Click on the session hyperlinked titles for slides and streaming video. Did you attend CALICon too? What were your favorite sessions or biggest takeaways? Find other sessions from CALICon 2019, or past years in CALIorg's YouTube Playlists.