Big Talk From Small Libraries

We’ve finished editing and posting all of the recordings and the can all be found via the presentations page. Each session has its own page which includes the recording along with any presentation files we’ve received from the presenters.

Now that everything’s been recorded and posted we’d also like to encourage everyone to fill out the evaluation form on Survey Monkey. We’ve enjoyed receiving all of your comments thus far but we do need to get some specific data for our final report. We appreciate you taking just a few moments and answering just 12 simple questions.

Thanks for participating and we look forward to seeing you again in 2014.

A librarian from the Southern Adirondack Library System attended the conference and wrote a blog post about her experience. Here’s what I think was the best part:

Some of the speakers from libraries across the U.S. put our Raquette Lake Free Library, serving 132 people in a league with others.  Remember Brant Lake’s one room stone building on the water?  We saw pictures of how the Wall Community Library in South Dakota,  re-invented their 600 sq of space and made it look big and most importantly functional.  They also did this in phases with very little money.

That’s what I love to hear. The point of this conference was to show that even small libraries have something to say and are doing amazing things. Thanks to SALS for the kind words and we hope to see you again next year.

First we’d like to thank everyone for all of the kind comments that have been coming in via e-mail and twitter. From the sounds of it everyone had as great a time attending the conference as we did hosting it.

As for an official evaluation form for the day, we have one at the ready but due to the fact that we’ve needed to reschedule the last session for next week, we’ve decided to hold off releasing the URL for the evaluation form until after that session. Once all of the sessions have been successfully broadcast we’ll be sure to post the evaluation link here and e-mail it out to all attendees.

Thanks again for all of your support.

We’ve been receiving supplemental materials from our speakers are are starting to post them on the site along with recordings of the presentations as quickly as we can separate and edit them from a 7.5 hour video file. You can find it all on the 2013 Presentations page.

First Christa, Laura, and I would like to thank every presenter and attendee of yesterday’s conference. It was an amazing day and we appreciate the effort that everyone put in to making the event as great as it was for the second year in a row. So far early feedback has been wonderful and we look forward to hearing more. So, what’s next?

We’re finalizing the online evaluation form and will get that up either today or early next week. We use SurveyMonkey and we’ll post the link here when it’s available.

As most of you are aware, the Internet connection for state government of Nebraska (connection, Web sites, e-mail, the whole enchilada,) decided to collapse about mid-way through our last session with Melissa and Katrina. The down time lasted less than ten minutes, but by that point the damage to the conferencing software had been done and we had no way to get the show back up and running quickly. Since it was the last session of the day, we had to make a quick decision and regretfully ended the day a bit early.

As we’ve already said, we’re working with Melissa and Katrina and will schedule a new time for them to re-deliver their presentation. We’ll be inviting all Big Talk attendees to the new time and will be sure to record it for posting here.

Luckily, the unscheduled ending to the conference does not seem to have done any damage to the recording of the rest of the day’s presentations. So, as planned, we’ll be editing the recording into individual sessions and posting them here on the blog as they’re completed. Start looking for those videos early next week.

We’re also in the process of collecting PowerPoint files, Prezi links, handouts, and any other materials that our presenters have for us. As we receive this material we’ll also be posting it here.

Lastly, we’ll be looking at the results of the in-conference surveys and other statistics that GoToWebinar gathered for us and posting them too. The one number I do have right now is 335; the highest number of people logged in at a single time during the conference. (That’s 56 more than last year.)

So, thanks again to all of our presenters and all of you who attended. Without any of you, the day wouldn’t have been the success that it was.

And before you ask, yes we are planning to do this again next year so feel free to save February 28, 2014 in your calendar.