Managing Events through Digital Commons: the LibTech Conference at Macalester

Transcription

1 Subscriber Resources Presentations The Berkeley Electronic Press Year 2010 Managing Events through Digital Commons: the LibTech Conference at Macalester Ron Joslin Courtney Smith Macalester College, Berkeley Electronic Press, This paper is posted at Digital Commons.

2 1

3 2

4 With the event feature, an institution or library is able to provide tools to manage the lifecycle of conference scholarship, from submission through to final publication on the web. The event feature is designed to show that event s scholarship and metadata in a meaningful way. University of Massachusetts Amherst s Wood Structures Symposium is featured on this slide. See it live here: 4

5 Some conference managers and repository administrators link to or embed other relevant conference information. For example, Macalester s LibTech conference embedded a registration frame within its event. Utah State University IR Day event (shown on this slidehttp://digitalcommons.usu.edu/irday/) includes links to relevant local information. This is also where they included registration information before the conference. 5

6 ESENCe includes a slideshow on its conference s homepage ( and also provides a collection of articles for participants to access and read prior to their day long workshop in October

7 Now that you ve heard a bit about the feature from the front end view, I ll go on to describe some basics on the back end that you ll need to know to manage and organize an Event Community within the repository. 7

8 First, you ll notice that any event you build will be listed as an IR Event Community, as shown in this slide. In the administrative interface it will take the form of ir_event_community. 8

9 The IR Event Communities are nested structures, similar to journals. They allow for flexible grouping and organization. Within an Event Community, you can have Themes, Tracks, and single Events. I ve shown the analogues in journal form here on this slide. While it s not an exact one to one comparison, this is a useful metaphor to use to begin to think about event communities. The Event is where the metadata for a presentation and the full text of that presentation sit. Events are grouped into a Track and multiple Tracks are grouped into a Theme. Finally, multiple Themes constitute one Event Community. 9

10 The nested structure allows for flexible organization. For a yearly, or regularly occurring conference, like Macalester s Library Technology Conference ( or Illinois-Wesleyan s John Wesley Powell Student Research Conference ( you would probably use a traditional organization where each year is its own theme, and within each of those themes, each day or topic is assigned a track. Take a look at their sites to get an idea of what this might look like. The flexibility of the event structure also makes it easy to capture occasional, one-time, or as-needed events. For example, Pacific University s Center for University Excellence ( utilizes the event structure to capture this type of event. 10

11 Now that I ve introduced the event feature, I d like to turn the presentation over to Ron to talk about Macalester s specific events implementation for the Library Technology Conference. 11

12 12

13 13

14 14

15 15

16 16

17 17

18 18

19 During the webinar, Ron provided a behind the scenes look at how conference managers received conference proposals, reviewed, and accepted or rejected those proposals. He also showed some customizations the conference organizers made to the submission form and metadata fields. The full webinar is available to Digital Commons subscribers in the Subscriber Events section of Subscriber Resources: 19

20 20

21 First, I thought it would be helpful to walk you through the most common path for developing event content. In its first year, we saw most institutions using the event feature to archive content after the event occurred. This is mainly, I suspect, due to the fact that conference organizers need a fair amount of lead time to use the repository to manage an event somewhere between six months and a year. Many of those IR administrators that started by retrospectively archiving are now going on to offer submission and review tools to those conferences going forward. I ve been told that the benefit of this path is to allow the library to understand the full set up and workflow process. On the other hand, many of the newer conferences turn the controls over to conference managers right away (much like journals do to editors) and we see a greater number now starting their repository presence with a call for papers. 21

22 So how do libraries alert faculty and other campus units to this service? Conversely, how do they seek out events that would be appropriate for archiving in the repository? Essentially, how do they get the word out? Liaison librarians, should you have a liaison program, are essential to communicating with a large faculty. Arm your liaisons with talking points and an understanding of basic functionality. They re the ones who will hear or alert faculty to the events-handling capabilities in the repository. Check in with your current repository participants. Many journals have affiliated events, and centers, institutes, and departments are sure to have occasional symposia. Chances are, the scholarship from these is currently either sitting on someone s hard drive or hidden deep within a departmental website. Collateral or leave behinds are a great strategy for the repository as a whole. Make sure your collateral mentions that the library can support faculty in capturing a record of their events. Finally, many repository managers look through campus news service announcements or internal listservs to find announcements of upcoming events. Often, when the IR manager approaches the conference organizer about archiving the event, the organizer is thrilled. 22

23 Finally, I want to take a closer look at what faculty like. And I should say, that in this context, when I say faculty, I mean this in a broader conference participant sense. Your conference participants may in fact be faculty from other institutions, grad students, or professionals working outside of academia. In any case, event participants and authors are generally most persuaded by value add services they aren t getting elsewhere. We ll look at these five points individually, but I should mention that I haven t included one that Ron mentioned and one I ve heard often. Conference organizers are often looking for one central location to house all the scholarship from all past conferences a comprehensive portal for the conference, essentially. DC can now serve as this portal. 23

24 Eastern Michigan University s Management Faculty of Color Association Annual Conference ( is an example of a conference that manages submissions through the repository. 24

25 A conference or other event can be branded with its own look and feel. This is particularly appealing to centers and institutes, which are often looking to increase their digital, branded identity. The Utah State University Digital Commons hosts several conferences. Some maintain the same look and feel as the repository. Others, like the Conference on University Education in Natural Resources, choose to apply a look and feel independent of the repository s design. See the Quinney Library s Conference on University Education in Natural Resources here: 25

26 Marquette University s law review captures its symposia in the repository. Each presentation at the recent International Media and Conflict Resolution symposium was also captured on video. That video streams from the metadata page, where the presentation (PPT or PDF) is also available for download. For more, see: 26

27 Conference scholarship can t get used if it s sitting on a faculty member s hard drive. Archiving conference content in the repository can lead to better discovery and dissemination of that content. Repository managers report that conference participants and organizers are thrilled with the good search results their conferences often get. Ron described the significant improvement in LibTech s search results once it moved to the repository. Here, I performed a Google search for animal studies wollongong and the Animal Studies Conference at the University of Wollongong ( showed up at the top of the search results. 27

28 Finally, conference organizers and participants enjoy the ability to assess impact of the scholarship via usage reports. Authors can receive monthly download reports by . Conference managers and repository administrators can also access Digital Commons usage statistics for the conference, as well as request that we apply Google Analytics to the conference in order to track traffic to the site. Read more about usage reports here: 28

29 I hope this webinar has given you a sense of how to manage an event through your repository. Should you be interested in setting up your first event, or transitioning from archiving to fully managing the event within the repository, here are the steps to take. First, contact Client Services to learn more about the feature and describe what you re looking to capture. Next, I recommend having a call or tour with Client Services and with your conference organizers to establish structure, brand, and workflow. They ll get everybody trained and you ll be on your way. 29