Communicating with Patrons: The Best of the Best

Poster sessions are a regular part of professional conferences in many fields, providing an avenue for numerous presenters to briefly showcase ongoing projects, and an opportunity for attendees to browse a wide variety of mini-presentations. The Annual Meeting has not traditionally held a full poster session, but program C4, the ALL-SIS Student Services Committee’s Communicating with Patrons: The Best of the Best, represented a successful foray in that direction. Limited to only six posters out of numerous submissions, the program offered a diverse array of short talks on patron outreach initiatives.

 “The Law Library: An All-in-One Destination,” by Jessica Drewitz of the Pepperdine School of Law, presented the evolutionary development of a series of weekly and daily social events designed to draw students to the library. Drewitz described Happy Hour study breaks, informal Tuesday Café lunch sessions with faculty, and the self-explanatory Coffee Bar; she also introduced the Smart Bar, a one-stop computer and printing helpdesk for students and faculty. Drewitz disclosed specific budget amounts for each program and generally described the positive student response to these innovations.

Marcia Dority Baker and Stephanie Pearlman, of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, presented a similarly simple but effective ice-breaker, “Tweet Treats.” This Twitter-based, thematic treasure hunt game developed out of an informal discussion, and has served not only to give students a friendly introduction to library personnel and resources, but also led to a dramatic increase in the library’s Twitterati following. The presenters emphasized the extremely low budget (“$12 for candy from WalMart.”), and the fun—for both staff and followers—involved in creating and maintaining the project.

Shifting gears from “library as place” to the “library in cyberspace,” Harvard Law School’s George Taoultsides’ poster presented the development of the revamping of the library’s “For Students” page from a static web page to a dynamic portal highlighting virtually every library service available to students. Taoultsides reviewed how focus groups and other student feedback were instrumental in the transformation, and briefly discussed the development cycle and future plans.

Two sessions—“Pulling Out All the Stops” (by Stefanie Weigman and Jennifer Duperon, of Boston University) and “Law Library Research Certificate Seminars” (by Amy Burchfield and Sue Altmeyer of Cleveland Marshall)—showcased the development, marketing, and initial outcomes of each library’s research certification programs. Of the six poster tables, only the Cleveland-Marshall session offered a printed handout, which included the main points of their talk (such as helpful hints for creating a certificate program, attendance and evaluation statistics, and links to sample course materials).1 The BU presentation focused on the carefully planned marketing effort and presented outcomes and student feedback.

Finally, Todd Ito and Marjorie Schilt of the University of Chicago presented “Targeted BNA Newsletter Subscriptions” used to promote student familiarity with current awareness products. The library matched the topical coverage of weekly newsletters with substantive law courses and coordinated with instructors to automatically subscribe students based on class rosters, although students were given the option to opt out of the weekly email updates. Ito’s presentation highlighted the largely positive feedback from students.

Almost as interesting as the program content was the novel format of the session. Based on an informal observation of the session, there were typically anywhere from 4 to 12 attendees at each table at any given time, and most presenters kept their talks to about 10 minutes, allowing audiences to rotate among all of the tables during the one hour slot. In this sense the program was less like a traditional poster session—where, as in the Exhibit Hall, presenters often vie for the attention of roaming, browsing attendees—and a little more like speed-dating, where all attendees eventually see all the tables.

An expanded poster session would be a good addition to future Annual Meetings. Although the stated rationale for capping posters at six was space constraints, the double ballroom venue was more than sufficient to accommodate at least twice as many tables and participants. A more salient limit would be the time slot. Increasing the number of posters would mean attendees might have to pick and choose which tables to focus on, and would have to be comfortable moving from table to table while talks are in mid-stream. However, presenters prepared with self-explanatory graphics to provide the gist of their work, handout materials highlighting their main points, and a perhaps the willingness to engage in a certain level of salesmanship (all features of the poster sessions at many professional conferences) would give attendees a greater choice of sessions and would offer more opportunities for presenters.