Two posts on presentations at Cil2006 reminded me of one my pet peeves when watching conference presentations: presenters who don’t “get to the good stuff” right up front.

First, Sarah Houghton at Librarian in Black warns us to Beware Ego Centric Conference Sessions:

The thing that annoys me the most at conferences is not PowerPoint slides, or people reading directly from their notes, or people’s cell phones going off…it’s presenters who stand up and talk to you for an hour about the minutiae of what happened at their library during a certain project, talking in great excruciating detail about how their library “did it” including each administrative step, what specific challenges they faced from their administrators/boards/patrons/staff, and really giving you nothing to take away that is useful.

I’m afraid that most times, though, these offenders aren’t really “egocentric,” but simply clueless (I have no problem with egocentric people who actually deliver). My pet peeve is a subset of what Sarah is talking about.

Amanda Etches-Johnson at blogwithoutalibrary.net comes closer to what bugs me. Writing about Paul Miller of Talis (who apparently is the counterexample for my pet peeve) she says:

Minor aside: the session overview is so crucial. It has the potential to hook your audience or lose them from the get-go. I’m often amazed at the lack of attention paid to the overview. But anyway. Paul’s overview was great — succinct, interesting, and had me looking forward to the rest of the session.

Exactly. I often feel like presenting librarians have made a genre error when preparing their presentations. Their talk feels more like a parable or children’s story (“Once upon a time, there was a little library who didn’t have a budget for a big, bad virtual reference program…”) where they don’t want to give away the ending too quickly. As Sarah points out, they include too many dead-end, deadly dull details about their own situation (“And then the consortium decided not to fund that project after all…”) and tell you what the actual solution was in the last five minutes (by which time I have usually bailed out for another session).

Instead, we need to present as if we are writing a news story with an attention-grabbing headline and a lede sentence and paragraph that tells the audience why they should stay put and not go down the hall to hear Cliff Lynch or something: “Virtual reference systems stink. At Groovy college, we use free instant messaging for online reference and, if you listen to me for the next half hour, you can do it too.”

And, as Sarah also points out, you need to deliver on that promise. If your solution is too specific to your institution or if you aren’t willing to put the relevant details on a handout or web page, you are again wasting my time. I understand we all need to present at a conference to have something to put on our annual performance reviews, but let’s try and make it worth everyone’s time.