AMTF Conference Call Notes October 22, 2012

Participating:  Nancy Beaumont, Rebecca Bizonet, Fynnette Eaton, Lynn Eaton, Kathy Marquis, Rachel Vagts, Carl Van Ness

Updates from four subgroup chairs, and discussion of scheduling changes in recent years.

Discussion of how the change in scheduling of roundtables came about:

·         Desire to have same 2 hours as Section meeting, when roundtables had 1 ½ hours
·         At New Orleans meeting moved a chunk of roundtables to Wednesday, 5-7 pm, because people would have arrived by then.
·         Complaints about only 15 minutes between sessions
·         Increase in number of roundtables to 31, requiring 3 session blocks
·         Growth in size of roundtables, requiring good-sized room (only ca. 10 such rooms available in any time block)

In previous years Exhibit Hall was open for 2 full days.  Exhibitors prefer current schedule and the exhibits have grown with more boutique shows. 

All of the changes except for the Exhibit Hall were member driven.  Expanded the number of time slots for roundtables, increased the time to 2 hours and there is now more time between sessions.

Status Reports

Rachel Vagts noted that her group (social responsibility) has not done much recently, although they have come to a consensus and will try to get that pulled together.    She noted that MAC is currently having some labor issues with their meeting location.  Nancy Beaumont volunteered that she is sharing information with the MAC leadership on SAA’s experiences.

Kathy asked if Rachel could do a blog that would solicit input from the membership, by showing what questions the group is looking at and where it is looking for answers.  Kathy asked Rachel to share a draft with the group and then it could be published.  The date for this was October 26^th.

Nancy has fielded questions to a variety of organizations and people are not responding.  Are we asking the same people?  We definitely need to coordinate.  Carl and Lynn agreed to target same groups.  Carl will get back with Lynn, and Rebecca should keep in touch with the both.

Discussion of how to share results from surveys and not contact the same organizations more than once.  At this point Carl and his content group are looking at what 30 organizations have on-line.  They might contact an organization if they have questions.  This week is the deadline for reporting what they find. 

It was agreed that we should use the full task force to get feedback, and help subgroups determine where to focus their efforts.

Rebecca Bizonet said that her online access group will contact a few organizations.

Lynn Eaton will talk about the model group’s survey results and highlight their work with Carl .  One of the questions:  is a meeting held in a conference center really viable?  Will there be enough rooms? 

Nancy responded that they are looking at 2^nd tier cities for conference centers, such as Tampa and Portland.  Portland has a convention center with 3 hotels, which is some distance from downtown area.  The issue remains that the conference center would charge for meeting rooms, which are offset by hotels when we hold the conference in that hotel.  Nancy has heard that some visitor centers might be working to change that model.

Kathy noted that she attended a Public Librarian Association meeting in Portland (2010) that met at the conference center.  Kathy promised to send Nancy what information she had about that experience.

There was general agreement that it would be great to experiment.

Nancy reported that the New Orleans Program Committee chairs have decided to have one track at New Orleans, which will be recorded.  The sessions will be identified ahead of time and all these sessions will be held in the same room to hold down the costs. 

[updated communication from Nancy, 10/29 via email:  “Nothing is a done deal yet; I’ll be working with the Program Committee to determine if they would like to schedule a track—presumably for “new professionals”—that could run in one room throughout the conference.  No, it would not be videotaped.  (We had videotaped a session in Austin and it wasn’t very dynamic because the camera was fixed in place. Not worth the cost.)  We’re talking about audiotaping and synching with slides to be presented in an on-demand webinar format – for a fee.  So it’s not a huge leap forward; it’s a baby step.”]

There was agreement that this was a good idea and that there should be a good deal of publicity about this.  It was also agreed that it could not be free, but it should not be overly expensive either.  One advantage of doing this would be the knowledge gained as far as costs.

It was suggested that the SNAP list would be a good place to have the publicity and it was suggested that crowd-sourcing should be used to select the sessions that will be recorded for online presentation.