Leveraging IR Materials for Pre- and Post-Conference Attendance

This presentation examines the process of building a conference collection on Digital Commons with a discussion on stakeholder collaboration, collection architecture, and promotion, and reciprocal benefit to both scholars and repository managers. Conference collections enhance attendees’ experiences by creating a live archive of conference materials, viewable both during and after the event. Collections provide meaningful metrics for interactions with conference materials, which exist as grey literature that may otherwise go unseen by wider audiences. Building conference collections vary in time and complexity, based on stakeholder needs and overall vision for the conference and its attendees. Creating conference collections that are live during conference dates provides seamless interaction between conference materials and attendees, via apps and QR codes provided on physical materials such as posters or handouts. These collections also provide authors with additional space to provide full lists of references, contact information, and supplemental content that may not be readily available in person or on a physical poster. Conference collections within institutional repositories provide both authors and attendees a space to interact at length with conference materials, and produces a public archive for scholarly output to be seen