Editor’s note: Today’s post is by Tim Lloyd, the founder and CEO of LibLynx, a company providing identity, access and analytics solutions for publishers and libraries.
One of the most challenging aspects of the pandemic has been the need to isolate ourselves from our communities. We’ve all experienced this in our personal and work lives, and we’ve all developed coping measures in response - with varying degrees of success. Necessity has certainly proven the mother of invention over the last two years.
An important example of this is last year’s virtual SSP conference. Following the cancellation of SSP’s 2020 Annual Meeting, the 2021 meeting was born out of the need to come together as a community at a time when physical meetings weren’t feasible (and continue to prove challenging). It was also a massive experiment for SSP — the first virtual annual meeting in our history, and one that had to be rapidly planned and executed as it became clear that our traditional in-person conference was not going to happen.
Delivering the 2021 virtual meeting was a huge achievement by last year’s annual meeting program committee. But this post is forward-looking because innovation is never a destination where we arrive but rather a journey we take, so it’s important for us to reflect on both what we have accomplished and what we can improve. In particular, what can we learn from our experience of the 2021 meeting that can inform future annual meetings, whatever the format?
Please select this link to read the complete article from The Scholarly Kitchen.