The IGeLU Steering Committee & Program Planning Committee are pleased to announce that the preparations for the IGeLU 2021 Digital Conference & Developers’ Day are progressing and you will be invited to submit your proposals shortly. As you will have noted from the previous message from the IGeLU Chair Dave Allen, the 2021 conference events will be entirely digital; this is summarised at: https://igelu.org/archives/13482. There will be no charges for this year’s digital events.
With the above in mind we would like to invite you to consider any potential proposals to present with a view to submitting these at the start of June. We would like to give you advance warning that we will be using a new more streamlined system this year and not ProposalSpace; we will of course supply comprehensive details about the new submission and registration portal when we officially issue the first call in early June.
Dates: Developers’ Day will take place on Monday 23 August with the conference being held as planned from Tuesday 24 to Thursday 26 August.
All sessions will be hosted on Zoom with multiple Zoom instances to support the usual parallel conference tracks. We still intend to offer the opening keynote presentation plus the Ex Libris Senior Management Q&A, with this latter session being a live event and longer in duration than in 2020. More information about our keynote speaker in a forthcoming email!
Conference theme: Our conference theme is: “Equity, Equality, Diversity — Rapid Change in a Diverse World“. Please interpret this as you see fit but we would like to include content covering innovations and how you have re-imagined services and processes, and how libraries can continue to move forward to serve customer diversity in this most challenging of times.
Conference outline: We have made adjustments to the length of individual breakout sessions (now 25 minutes plus 5 minutes for Q&A) and will offer a cut-down programme in terms of hours as we appreciate all delegates will be mindful of the amount of screen time involved in a digital event. Session lengths for Developers’ Day will be 15 or 30 minutes as last year. The overall conference outline can be found at:
https://igelu.org/archive-of-presentations/2021-digital-conference/2021-conference-dates-and-times
We will also be offering content in multiple time zones and languages with details announced when the programme is made available late July/early August. We also encourage all presenters to consider how best to deliver their presentations in a digital environment and this could include recording presentations in advance to ensure the sessions run smoothly. Presenters should also make themselves available online according to the programme to answer questions directly after their presentation.
Knowledge Days: Please note that this year Ex Libris will be offering Knowledge Days throughout 2021 and that there will not be a specific Knowledge Day associated with the IGeLU Digital Conference. More information is at: https://page.exlibrisgroup.com/knowledge-days-2021
General information about the 2021 conference can be found on the IGeLU website at:
https://igelu.org/archive-of-presentations/2021-digital-conference. We are already looking forward to seeing you online later in the year and only wish that this was in less challenging circumstances than those imposed by the on-going COVID-19 pandemic. If you have any questions please contact us at the conference email address: mailto:conference@new.igelu.org.
More information will be circulated about Zoom, registration, timetabling, keynotes & presentations in due course.
Look after yourselves, your family and your friends, keep safe and healthy, and we hope to see you all online in August 2021.
Tracey Clarke & Francois Renaville
On behalf of the IGeLU Steering Committee
Digital Conference 2021, Program Planning Committee