one two three.

I recently gave three very similar presentations on Informing Innovation at two very different conferences, LAUC-B 2009 and Internet Librarian 2009. I’ve posted my slides from each event, which, from a design perspective, was an interesting exercise in repurposing content make similar points to distinct audiences. Reusing/recycling is one of my instructional design absolutes (e.g., never start from scratch if you don’t have to).

The LAUC-B 2009 conference, “Student library users: Deliver what they need – the way they want it,” (obviously) explored student needs and characteristics in order to create library services that reflect actual desires rather than our assumptions. The format of the LAUC presentations was interesting, and something I plan to keep in mind for similar events should I ever have a hand in organizing any – in a short afternoon panel, myself and two other groups gave 15-minute “teaser” introduction to what we would be talking about at a longer 45-minute “breakout session.”

By allowing participants to get a feel for the presenters and the way they might tackle their topics, I found this short/long format stagger to be excellent at addressing the perennial which-session-do-I-go-to dilemma that arises from trying to make snap decisions based on vague titles. The LAUC conference itself was excellent – I had an incredibly responsive audience, and any stage I get to share with Joan Lippincott and Sarah Houghton-Jan is a fine stage by me. My talk at Internet Librarian covered similar content in a much shorter format, universalized a bit to be more useful to the typically public-heavy crowd. My IL attendees were relatively sleepy, but with the 4:45 slot and consequent audience burnout I’m lucky people weren’t holding their eyelids open. It’s a busy week, so I will reflect more on both conferences when I come up for air (view my archived tweets/responses from #il2009, for starters).

Here are my slides from each session (and if you’ve seen my ACRL presentation on the Ohio research project, look again – some is duplicative, but much content is new):

LAUC-B Part 1 (short)

LAUC-B Part 2 (long)

And finally, tailored to an Internet Librarian audience (can you spot the differences?):