Conference Success!

Haven't blogged for quite a while as the Conference came and went and then I came and went on holiday - you need one after organising a conference!

I think we should be very proud of ourselves at CLAUD. The Conference seems to have been a great success. We had an excellent turn out for day 1 with over 50 delegates and speakers and even better at day 2 with over 60. I'm still waiting to hear from Matthew about the feedback forms, but you know you're onto a good thing when you can't hear yourself think during the coffee breaks because everyone is talking so loudly and networking so hard.

We had no speakers drop out at the last minute, no technical glitches (great IT/AV staff at the University of Gloucestershire!!) and interesting subjects to deal with. Our student speakers seem to have gone down very well indeed giving their personal feedback on issues of accessing learning materials. Alistair McNaught from TechDis gave a fascinating talk showing us that we can make things accessible without spending much money at all, with links to free software (he did mention Web 2.0 applications with Delicious) and advice. Even the publisher we had speaking went down well and she was pleased not to have had a mauling - I can't believe anyone would, we're all here to help, but apparently it has had happened to her in the past.

I've still to go through the audio recordings of the talks, but I'm hoping our speakers will be happy to let them be posted on the CLAUD site, and maybe even freely available on here.

A great Conference all round!

Conference Mania

I do very much enjoy organising things (possibly why I started out life as a Librarian!) and for the past few months have been sorting things out for the CLAUD 2008 Conference. Our theme this year is on accessible information, which is why we've called it "Not always the full text: working towards accessible learning resources".
It's been quite a task, especially organising it for a venue I've never seen before (others have as the 2006 Conference was there) and with Committee members scattered over the South and South-West of England. This year we got in some great admin help in the form of a staff member in another department (thank you Steve!) doing it in his own time (don't worry, we paid him!), so it's been less stressful and more fun.
I've learnt so much about organising conferences, I've even started looking into organising an assistive technology event in Oxford for next March - I just can't get enough.
So we're in the final stretch with the conference next Thursday, with the numbers finally in and people letting me know what they want for the evening meal on Day 1 (it's two days and residential). The badges have been printed, I've got most of the presentations, I'm sorting out the Braille and the Large Print documents. Fingers crossed for the 3rd & 4th July - off to look into making audio recordings of the presentations to put online - that's where Web 2.0 comes in!