CILIPS Annual Conference Amplification

The CILIP in Scotland (CILIPS) annual conference takes place at Peebles Hotel Hydro next week (Mon 1-Wed 3 Jun). This year we’re keen to try out new things, taking advantage of new technologies to make sure the conference has broader appeal and offers more scope for delegate contributions and interaction. This includes new features such as podcasting, vodcasting and liveblogging, which we hope delegates will be keen to take part in.

Following the success of the #cilip2 session, where librarians all over the UK (and beyond) used twitter to contribute to a London based discussion on CILIP’s use of Web2.0, we wanted to experiment with this approach in a wider conference context.

Through twitter, we made contact with Brian Kelly of UKOLN, who was a speaker at #cilip2 and offered valuable advice in how to go about the process of conference amplification. The first step was to assign, and use, an appropriate hashtag. In the interests of clarity and brevity, we opted for #cilips09 and have been using this in pre-conference publicity. It already seems to have caught on as a couple of our followers who will be attending the conference have now used the tag.

From observing the #cilip2 event, it was clear that prior publicity (through email lists as well as twitter and blogs) had played an important part in getting people twittering and using the assigned tag so we felt it was important to introduce the tag early on, even before proper publicity about amplification plans was distributed.
The first phase of publicising this activity has been directed at those attending the conference in person; using both email and twitter (and this blog) to alert delegates to what’s going on and to introduce the #cilips09 tag. The next step will be to promote the conference amplification to those who aren’t attending in person.

We will be using Cover It Live (CiL) embedded within the Slainte homepage to offer a good central focus for amplification; we’d previously been planning on hosting blogging, video, audio and photos separately but CiL, as recommended by Brain Kelly, is a very convenient way of drawing all output together. A further benefit is that delegates (physical or virtual) don’t have to have twitter accounts to submit comments via CiL. The fact that it’s embedded into our website will, hopefully, have broader appeal and perhaps attract people who don’t use social networking or Web2.0 services.

It will be interesting to see how many delegates will contribute to the liveblogging and what kind of contributions or participation comes from those who are not at the conference in person – only time will tell!

If you are attending conference and would be interested in liveblogging on the day, please remember to use the #cilips09 hashtag. Livebloggers will be offered free wifi access at the venue so please get in touch so that log-in details can be set up. And if you’re not attending, you can follow what’s going on from Slainte or by following the #cilips09 tag.