Best practices for Event Communities (EC)

Best practices for Event Communities (EC)

1.      Before you create the community – ask these questions:

What is the goal for putting the EC in Digital Commons?

                                                            i.      To meet grant requirements (http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/rocreformtrail/)

                                                             ii.      Archive a past conference (http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/g2/ or http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/lib2lms/)

                                                           iii.      Provide ongoing support (http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/divconf/) this conference has been hosted through Digital Commons for 5 years now. DC is so embedded into this conference that I have been made a member of the DivConf committee

                                                           iv.      Manage the conference through DC – including submissions, links to registration, maps, evaluations, proceedings, social media etc.  (http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/dcglug/)

So, depending on what level of involvement you are looking for, you might just set up a site, publish a schedule – with or without in-depth abstracts, follow-up after the conference to solicit presentations, vet submissions through DC, publish a proceedings booklet, and/or add photos and videos afterwards. We have all of those different types of conferences within Digital Commons at Brockport. But here, specifically are the things I did for DCGLUG.

I knew I wanted the DCGLUG site to be as robust as possible. I collaborated with another librarian to create the banner, which then was used on promotional material as well as at the top of the site. The introductory text changed several times throughout the conference lifespan. It originally contained links for submission of proposals, along with descriptions of what the sessions would look like. It later contained links to registration, pre-conference events, accommodations, directions, etc. For the most part, I commented them out (see attached) when I wanted to eliminate them from view. Post conference it was updated to give a summary of the day, and a link to next year’s conference.

One of the things my CSR (Lauren) will tell you is that I hate to make people drill down to get to content, so it’s important to me to have as much information appear on the landing page as possible. In the beginning, you had to drill down for everything (http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/divconf/2012/). But in the DCGLUG, the schedule is available on the landing page, and the pdf icon tells you immediately whether the presentation is there. (The pdf icon is something your CSR will have to add for you).  I also wanted to add a Twitter feed to the sidebar to capture moments of the conference. Once I decided on a #, I let Lauren know and she added it. I believe there are two options for a Twitter feed, your CSR can explain the difference – we always use this one. Since I really wanted to capture and preserve as much of the day as possible, one of my colleagues (Jennifer Kegler) and I took photos throughout the day, and another colleague (Ken Wierzbowski) volunteered to video capture it.  Jennifer uploaded her photos to the library’s Flickr account, and I combined the best of her collection with mine and asked Lauren to create an image gallery (http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/dcglug_images/), which I then pulled from to make the content carousel (Configuration option on your event community page).

For the videos, Ken and I both have Kaltura Media Space accounts through Brockport’s subscription. He was able to upload the video he took to there, and I was able to go in and create the embeddable link, and add it to the page using Embedly.