[Sigcabinet] ASIST Technical Sessions Reorganization

[KT Vaughan]

Hi SIG Cabinet Steering Cte, Gary, and Pascal!

As promised in the teleconference from way back, I'm starting off our 
discussion via email of how to revamp the technical sessions aspect of 
the ASIS&T Annual Meeting.  Pascal, I'm involving you in this because 
you're co-chair this year, and because you have lots of experience on 
the topic.  Gary is invited in his role as AM gadfly and 
President-Elect.  Feel free to ignore if you would like to (the rest of 
you don't have permission to ignore!).

The Board has asked us to propose new ways of organizing SIG-driven 
content at the Annual Meeting.  Currently these show up as the Technical 
Sessions.  Those, in turn, tend to be a standard model of a loosely 
organized set of 3-5 presenters giving talks with question time at the 
end.  There are some perceived problems with this model:
1: It's boring. (in general) Very little interaction happens with the 
audience, and if the talks aren't interesting people don't get much out 
of them.
2: It weights heavily toward academic rather than practical work, 
towards research rather than practice, and towards older research and 
completed research.  Not that any of these are bad/good - just that more 
variation would be desired (speaking as a practitioner who does very 
little research).
3: Reviewers are used to this model, so they tend to rate different 
kinds of panels less highly b/c they aren't used to other models.
4: Certain SIGs are good at organizing this kind of session, so they 
tend to overwhelm other SIGs in quantity of panels proposed and presented.

We've been asked to brainstorm and then propose to the Board a different 
way of running SIG "panels" (for lack of a better word).  One thing the 
Board has tentatively agreed to is to shorten the overall length of the 
conference from fourish days (Sunday through Wednesday) to threeish days 
(Sunday through Tuesday).  The SIG RUSH reception will become a welcome 
reception, and SIG CON will probably get folded into another reception 
(likely the President's?).  This means we'll probably go from having 
30ish panels to having at most 20.  A current proposal on the table 
would reduce panels down to 12; I'm lobbying hard to get it up to 18 at 
least. Given that we have 21 SIGs, that would by necessity mean that 
unless SIGs cosponsor, some won't have any programming at the AM at all.

Ok, so that's the current status.  What we need to do is to think hard 
about what a good SIG session COULD look like in the ideal world, and 
then how we can make sure those sessions are the ones that are proposed 
and presented.  Suggestions at the Board meeting included promoting 
industry/tech demo sessions, mini-workshops, interactive discussions, 
pecha kucha sessions, etc.  From a structural perspective, I think it 
would be interesting to subdivide the panels proposals by type - and 
declare up front that we'll only be accepting 6 traditional model 
sessions, 6 of some other type, and 6 of a third type.  Then SIGs can 
choose which type to submit to, recognizing that it could be a lot 
harder to get into one type than another.

Discussion!?

KT

PS: So sorry I've been out of touch.  As I think I noted before, I've 
been sick for weeks, and am finally feeling better.

-- 
KTL Vaughan, MSLS, AHIP
Pharmacy Librarian
UNC-CH Health Sciences Library	

Clinical Associate Professor of Pharmacy
UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy

CB 7585
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-7585
Phone: 919 966 8011
Fax: 919 966 5592
Email: ktlv at email.unc.edu