| Managing
abstracts
By Miles Clarke While it is barely three years since
conference organisers could safely assume that virtually everyone involved in
presenting at conferences was on email, the online environment continues to transform
the way meetings are planned and managed. Nowhere is this more evident
than with the laborious and painstaking businesses of managing abstracts and papers
for scientific and medical conferences for international meetings where the number
of papers and poster submissions run into the hundreds. Today most program
organisers require abstracts to be submitted online, while the unwieldy slide
carousels that were the mainstay of presentations for decades have made way to
Power Point presentations which is suitably equipped convention centres are delivered
t screen without even the presence of a laptop computer. Brisbane conference
software developer, Smartype, has devised an online system which allows the abstract
reviewer to ‘score’ the papers as they are submitted for review. This rating is
carried unseen with the abstract as it makes it easy past reviewers wherever they
may be located around the world. “The beauty of this refinement is that
the programme committee chairman is able to track exactly who has reviewed which
paper and once all the reviews are in they can download the abstracts into the
conference management system – in Australia this is Amlink’s Events in most cases,”
said Sue Wickenden, who heads Smartype. Benefits include: - complete
interface with the online environment
- authors can go back into the system
and change their details, right up until abstract close. This relieves the organiser
of a lot of extra work
- formatting of the abstract is simplified ie: all
same type face and size etc.
- the review process is tracked [compliance]
and recorded
- easy contact can be made online between reviewers and successful
presenters
The management of abstracts has also been automated in
a major way. With literally thousands of pages of abstracts submitted for
larger conferences, the organisers have often resorted to photocopying the hard
copy and reducing it to fit four pages to a single A4 sheet before sending them
off for print. Sue Wickenden: “We have taken the abstracts database and
transformed the abstracts into a digital form that any reputable printer can use
to make up into a finished artwork to produce an abstracts volume. For larger
conferences this will save hundres of hours and significantly reduces the risk
of papers getting lost or mixed up in the photocopying exercise.” Reproduced
from Mice.net,
March 19, 2003. Page 60. [go to top] | 
