Big Talk From Small Libraries

We’ve been crunching the numbers from both GoToWebinar and those of you that filled out the post-conference survey. Here’s what we know about you:

Log-ins by country/state:

Based on those of you that filled out the post-conference survey (about 1/3rd of attendees):

Some of them are still being processed for display by YouTube as I post this but I can say that all but one of the videos are now available via the presentation pages. The recording of Jessamyn’s presentation is still being worked on to solve the technical issues and will be posted once it becomes available.

I finally got over the hurdle that was preventing me from getting the 8 hours of video split into their individual presentations and have posted the first three on their relevant pages. Those three are Helping Your Patrons E-Read, Community Partnerships, and The FFL Fabulous Laboratory: Developing a Read/Write Culture in Your Library

Audio recordings of seven of our eight presentations are now available for streaming and downloading on each of the individual presentation pages. (Due to technical issues the audio for Jessamyn West’s presentation is still being worked on.)

There are still several slide decks I’m waiting to receive from the speakers and I’m working on getting the videos edited and posted. (I am away at Computers in Libraries next week so it may be another full week before videos start to become available on the site.)

Let me just start by thanking all of the speakers for the amazing job that they did. The feedback is starting to come in and so far every bit of it regarding the content presented has been positive. I’m not sure I could have found a better set of presenters for this first event. All of them were given very little instruction on how or what to present and they all were nothing less than spectacular.

Next, to everyone who attended, thanks for your support and all of your wonderful questions and feedback during the event. We broke every NLC record with an official registration count of 445 and at one point had 279 people logged into the conference which still broke our previous record of just over 100.

I must also thank my co-hosts. Christa, Laura and I are still recovering from the day. I won’t speak for them specifically but I must say that sitting at a table for the better part of nine hours, running an event like this was more exhausting than I’d expected. I should be fully recovered by Monday.

Lastly, thanks to our co-sponsors ARSL and Library Renewal. Their help in promoting this event helped us reach the numbers we did.

As to the event itself, yes, there were a few technical difficulties during the day, but given the breadth of the locations the speakers were logging into from (Upstate New York to rural Idaho) and varying level of experience with presenting in an online environment (never before to very often), we’re very happy with how it ended up. (We’ll do our best to address the issues we can in post-production.)

Specifically to the folks that didn’t receive the login information in advance, we’d like to offer an official apology. That e-mail is sent out automatically by some software we have little-to-no control over and in the past we’ve found that there seems to be about a 10% failure rate. When you have just 30 people registered for an event, that’s just 3 problems. When you have over 400, that’s many more problems. However, we’ve tracked it all and the failure rate for that still seemed to fall into the normal range. Expecting this, we did our best to get the information to you via other means like our automatic e-mail responses, having our phone staff prepared with the necessary information, and posting the login instructions on this site. So far we’ve received no e-mail saying that anyone who wanted to attend was unable to log in and hopefully that didn’t end up happening to anyone.

So, what’s next?

Please take a few minutes and let us know what you thought of the event. If you logged in, you should have already received and e-mail from GoToWebinar with the link to our post-event survey. If not, you can access the survey @ http://www.surveymonkey.com/bigtalkfromsmalllibraries. We will be reading every single comment and do want to know what you thought of the event. Feel free to also leave a comment on the feedback page if you’d like to share your thoughts publicly.

We’re working on processing the video recording and collecting all of the presentations, links, and resources from the speakers. As that material becomes available we’ll get it posted on the presentations page as quickly as we can. In the end, especially due to our upcoming travel schedules, it may take a few weeks to get everything posted, but it will be posted. Just keep checking back every few days and we’ll keep you updated here.

We’ve also been asked if we’ll be doing this again. That’s a great question. Well, I want to do it again and we’ve already started talking about it. So keep an eye on this site and definitely encourage us however you can if you want another one of these events in the future. (By the way, volunteering to present at the next one would be a great way to encourage a next one.)

Thanks again to everyone who participated at every level!

I wouldn’t exactly call these photos “exciting”, but for those interested in what the event looked like from our end, here’s a peek.