Revisiting Event Amplification

and How” At next week’s ILI conference Alison McNab, Academic Librarian at the University of Huddersfield, will be giving a talk in a “Quick Win” session on “ Amplifying your event: who, what, where, when, why and how “. In this lightning talk she will provide “practical tips on using social media to promote and amplify events”. The session “will be of particular interest to LIS professionals who are new to supporting events whether at a local level or as part of a professional network”. As this is an area of particular interest to me I felt this would provide an opportunity to provide some reflections on the topic of event amplification. Background The term ‘amplified event’ probably arose from a blog post published in July 2007 by Lorcan Dempsey in which he described how “ It is interesting to watch how more conferences are amplifying their effect through a variety of network tools and collateral communications. ” The post referred to initial observations of use at academic conferences of “ pictures on Flickr , the presentations, podcasts , and, hey, there is even a Facebook group devoted to conference interests. ” Early Examples An early example of event amplification was described in a post on On-The-Fly Professional Development And Learning published in October 2008. Around the same time Owen Stevenson live-blogged at the ILI 2008 conference which included a post on Using Twitter to Live Blog ILI08 – some thoughts . Back then discussions focussed on the various communications technologies which could be used to enrich the experiences at events, including pre-web communications technologies such as IRC (reviewing in a post on Micro-blogging At Events ), microblogging tools such as Jaiku (no longer available) and Coveritlive (with archives of use of this tool from 2009 at the CILIP MmIT Conference 2009 – Mobile learning: what exactly is it? and the Future of Technology in Education (FOTE) 09 still available on the eFoundations Livewire web site). In addition to the communications infrastructure at event there was also much experimentation with tools for resource sharing (with slides often shared on Slideshare and photos taken at events on Flickr , links typically shared using Delicious) and video recordings of talks on Vimeo ) and dedicated social networking environments for events such as Crowdvine (no longer available). There has been a lot of volatility in the marketplace for event amplification tools over the past ten years. However for communications Twitter continues to be widely used and some example of its use at ILI conferences are given below. Event Amplification at ILI Conference Twitter Archives I have made use of Twitter at many of the ILI conference I have attended over the past 10 years. In many cases it has been used in an informal way. However at ILI 2011 I created a couple of archives of event tweets in order to illustrate potential benefits. Then at the ILI 2013 conference I created archives of tweets for a workshop session which I facilitated with Tony Hirst. On both occasions Storify was used to creation the Twitter archives. The Storify service was subsequently withdrawn from service but as notice of the withdrawal of the service was given, I was able to migrate the data to the Wakelet service. A summary is given below. Title of Archive About Purpose ILI 2011: Reflections on the ILI 2011 conference Small number of tweets posted at the end of the event in which delegates summarise their thoughts on the conference. Illustrate how capturing a small number of tweets can help gauge an audience’s reflections. 12 tweets captured. ILI 2011: Session A101 – What’s on the Technology Horizon? Session A101 (What’s on the Technology Horizon) at ILI 2011 conference (tagged with #ili2011 #a101). Delegates asked to tweet using session hashtag (#a101) to enable speaker (myself) to reflect on comments made after the event. 37 tweets captured. ILI 2013: The Data Librarian An annotated summary of tweets about session B202: The Data Librarian. As chair of session I created this archive shortly after the session had finished. For this example annotated were provided to give a context for the 47 tweets. ILI 2013: Future Technologies Workshop Tweets about the Future Technologies pre-ILI 2013 conference workshop facilitated by Brian Kelly and Tony Hirst As a workshop facilitator I encouraged delegates to use the #ili2013fut hashtag to share their thoughts. 38 tweets captured. ILI 2013: The Conference Tweets A list of tweets containing the #ili2013 hashtag used for the ILI 2013 conference held in London on 15-16 October 2013. Example of an automated collection of tweets. 412 tweets captured. Revisiting #ILI2009 and #ILI2010 Earlier this morning (Sunday 14 October 2018) the Timehop app on my Android phone alerted me to memories I had posted to various social network services on this day in the past. I was interested to see several tweets which I had posted at the ILI 2010 (23 tweets in total) and ILI 2009 (21 tweets in total) events. These reflect some of the early memories of ILI events captured on social media services but cannot easily be shared with others. With the 20th anniversary event started in a few days I tho89ght I would see what recollections of ILI events are readily accessible using Google. No. Resource Notes #ILI2009 1 #ILI2009: The challenge of searching in Institutional Repositories Peter Murray-Rust’s thoughts, prior to his plenary talk at ILI 2009 2 Twitter | Karen Blakeman’s Blog Series of posts including one on “ Tweets from the past “ 3 OxfordStaffDev | Staff Development at Oxford University Libraries Series of posts including one on Internet Librarian International, London, 15-16 October 2009 #ILI2010 1 #ili2010 | Karen Blakeman’s Blog Two posts on use of social media in a corporate context and on social search 2 ili2010 | OUseful.Info, the blog. Two posts including one which analyses use of Twitter at the event 3 Transitioning Library and Information Service customers from consumers to collaborators – we still have a way to go.. | Elisabeth Goodman’s Blog Elisabeth Goodman’s report inspired by Dr Hazel Hall’s1 keynote presentation 4 Jinfo Blog: ILI 2010: the future lies in the cloud Penny Crossland’s report 5 Do libraries have a future? ILI2010 | Bethan’s information professional blog The script for Bethan Ruddock’s talk at ILI 2010 on “Do Libraries have a Future?” 6 Some musings post ILI2010 | FromMelbin “ILI2010 is now a week and hemisphere away, so here are a few thoughts it provoked from me” Note the resources given in the table are based on reflections on the ILI events provided by delegates and found on the first page of results using Google searches for #ILI2009 and #ILI2010 . Summary of Benefits of Event Amplification It’s probably fair to say that initially the interest in event amplification was focussed on technical aspects (which tools to use) and related issues (is the data interoperable; is the service sustainable) although other issues were considered (e.g. privacy and etiquette). As an example in 2010 there was a discussion about “‘ Quiet Zone[s]’ At Conferences “. But nowadays use of

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