LSA meeting report

[Heidi Johnson]

We had two events at the recent LSA meeting in Albuquerque. The tutorial

"How to make great audio & video recordings", Friday afternoon 2-5, and

OLAC office hours, Saturday afternoon 2-5.

 

The tutorial was a huge success. There were over 100 people in the audience

for nearly all of the three hours, more questions than we had time for,
people

coming up afterwards to ask more questions and offer praise. And this even

though the meeting was in a different building from the main sessions. We
could

probably repeat this tutorial, with slightly different angles on the
information, 

every year with the same success. We should at least consider repeating it

every 2-3 years, to keep people up-to-date on technology changes. We will be

posting the presentations on the OLAC site sometime in the next few months.

 

The office hours were not such a huge success, although we got more callers

than we did at the booth in Oakland, for zero $$. Gary Simons, Jeff Good,
and

I were there for the whole 3 hours, and we each had a couple of people
asking

questions. Laura Buszard-Welcher was there for an hour, and Helen Dry was

there for an hour, mainly to talk with Gary, I think :-). And that was a
good thing -

we had time to talk to each other, which was useful. It's better to sit at a
big

table than to stand in an awkward booth. 

 

So, I would vote for continuing to do office hours and not ever doing the
booth again. 

We should, however, try to angle for better placement - closer to the action
- and we 

need to make some handy colorful informative signs and remember to bring
tape to 

put them up with. It might also help if we could identify particular periods
for asking 

particular questions, like "help with audio equipment, 1-3", far enough in
advance to 

be able to publicize this somewhat. Our audience for the office hours might
build over 

the years, if we are consistently available.

 

All in all, a pretty good show, and it didn't cost us anything but our time.

 

Heidi

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