Report by Chris
Stave, Chair
NCNMLG Joint Meeting
Web Page
http://www-ncnmlg.stanford.edu:5000/jtmtg/
The Web Page served as a clearinghouse for information relating to the '99 Joint Meeting and was divided into the following sections: Registration, Preliminary Program, Posters, Presentations, Special Events, Exhibitors, CE Courses, San Jose Activities and Events, Committee Members, and Meeting Evaluation. Deciding on and implementing the overall page design was the most time-consuming part of the project. It was, however, relatively easy to keep the page current, as other committee members submitted information quickly and efficiently. There were some last minute attempts made to integrate meeting papers, posters, and PowerPoint slides into the website but, because of the significant amount of time required for conversion and uploading, the project was abandoned.
Recommendation: Webpages have the virtue of timeliness and accessibility and are the current medium of choice for transmitting information about meetings. If future planning committees decide that digitizing and loading posters, papers, etc. is justified, then meeting participants should know from the beginning that their papers and posters need to be "web-ready." Also, someone other than the website manager should coordinate uploading these documents to the webpage.
The Meeting Evaluation page was relatively popular, in spite of technical difficulties and minimal publicity ("minimal" because it wasn't certain that the evaluation page would actually work!)
NCNMLG Joint Meeting
Listserv
The NCNMLG Joint Meeting listserv was, after some preliminary technical difficulties, configured for Joint Meeting Planning Committee. The listserv was used regularly, and seemed to work reasonably well.
Recommendation: Technical problems aside, the listserv was a useful and relatively efficient medium for intra-committee communication. Generally, listservs are easy to setup and maintain, and handy tools for any large-scale planning process.
Statistics for the NCNMLG Joint Meeting Web Page Page Requests:
Homepage 1326
Program 351
Presentations 294
Registration 294
Chairs 252
Posters 183
Sorry - Page not up yet 180
SJ Info 177
Exhibitors 130
CE 128
Special Events 121
Evaluation Form 105
Jt Mtg Chairs' Letter 93
Contributed Papers 83
Chris Stave, Lane Medical Library
Stanford University Medical Center
Stanford CA 94305-5123
650-725-4580 Fax: 650-725-7471 e-mail: cstave@lanelib.stanford.edu
Note: Another possibility for mounting posters and presentations on the website would be to ask the presenters to e-mail their word processing files to the Electronic Program chair, who would specify which word processing program to use. Nearly all of the presenters had their talks or poster mounts in a word processing file, which many discarded immediately after the meeting. The Power Point files are too big to conveniently handle. Presenters should be asked to submit their word processing files when they are accepted to be on the program M.B. Train