Building a Program

The real power of using Access to organize a conference reveals itself when it comes time to build the conference program. The Conference Manager has a number of features that facilitate the process or organizing papers into panels, scheduling panels and sessions, and finally producing the conference program in HTML or printed formats.

Grouping Cards

The Conference Manager has a report, available on the Main Menu, which will print out information about each submitted paper on little cards, which you can then cut out and use to sort and group similar papers into panels. This technique of using paper cards to group papers together may seem low-tech, but has proven an extremely effective way to organize papers into panels, especially in a group setting.

Sessions

As described in the introduction, "Sessions" (as used in the Conference Manager) are a very flexible construct, and can be best thought of a time slot in the schedule representing any kind of activity such as a single panel of papers, concurrent panels, a break, a plenary address, a registration period, field trip, meal, etc. Before entering your sessions, it will be helpful to put them down on paper like a regular schedule. Then open the Sessions data entry form from the Main Menu.

Most of the fields in the sessions form are self-explanatory. If you unselect 'Print heading in program', the session name and its sub-title will not appear in the program (although any panels that fall under it will still appear). If the session is a paper session, you must select paper as the session type in order for panels to be assigned to it. If you assign an icon to go with the session, it will appear next to the session name in the HTML form of the program (note: this is not yet implemented). If you want a the name of a venue (location) to appear in the program, select one from the venue drop-down list or double-click the drop-down list to add a new venue in the Venue form.

Panels

The Panels data entry form is very similar to the sessions form. If a pre-title is entered, it will appear above the panel name in the program. This can be helpful if your conference is using 'streams' (e.g., a sequence of panels all related to a common theme, see the sample program for an example). If you don't want the panel name to appear in the program, unselect the 'Print heading in program'. Even if the name of the panel doesn't appear in the program, any papers that belong to the panel will still be listed. If there is more than one panel for the same session, the panels will be sorted alphabetically by name in the program. Like sessions, panels can also have an icon which will appear in the online program (not yet implemented).

Venues

Enter information about the different conference venues (i.e., locations) in the Venues form. Each venue can have a description, such as the room number, and a URL, which could for example take the user to a map to the room or a layout diagram. If a URL is entered for a venue, the venue name will be 'hotlinked' wherever the venue appears in the online program.

Panel Builder

After you have defined the sessions and panels in your conference, the easiest way to assign papers to panels is by using the Panel Builder. The Panel Builder interface is fairly straight-forward. At the top left is a list of the paper sessions in the conference. When you click on one, you see a list of the Panels in that session. You can also remove or add unassigned panels to a session using the list in the bottom center. Similarly, when you click on a Panel you will see a list of papers assigned to that panel, and you can add or remove papers from that panel. There are also buttons to change the order of papers in a panel.

Exporting the Program

Whether you are creating a program in HTML or printed format, you start by selecting 'Program Output' from the Main Menu. It should be noted that a 'Program', as conceived in the Conference Manager, is actually a collection of related files, including a schedule, one or more pages of abstracts, an author list, and indices.

There are three main tabs in the Program Output form. On the first tab you define the inclusion criteria for papers, authors and panels. You can select what will appear in the program by selecting the author registration status, paper status, paper format, and panels. Use the 'All', 'None' and 'Toggle' buttons to select or unselect groups of records.

On the second tab are buttons and options for creating an HTML version of the conference program. The buttons on the left will create the HTML files which collectively form the program. Click 'File Options' to select the output folder for HTML files, file names for the main pages, and header and footer HTML code which will appear at the top of each page.

The options box allows you to define how many abstract pages to have, and which abstracts should go on each page. In the current version the Conference Manager, abstracts are listed alphabetically by first author's last name. In a future version, there will be an option to also list them according to their appearance in the schedule. For each abstract page, you can specify the file name, whether posters or talks are included, a title for the page, and which papers will be on the page based on the first letter of the first author's last name. Click the 'Update' button to refresh the number of papers which fall under each page and also meet the inclusion criteria on the first tab. This will give you a rough idea of how long each page will be. Fifteen 300-word abstracts will result in a web page which is about 40K in size. Depending on the connection speed of your audience, you may want your abstract pages to have more or less abstracts on them. When you click the 'Update' button, the Conference Manager will also check to see if any papers may be left off, or if any papers may appear on more than one page. All abstract pages will be created in the 'HTML Output' folder which you can select by clicking the 'File Options' button.

Below that are some options whether or not to create cross links between the pages in the program, whether or not to show the date on the schedule, whether or not to include the time and venue on the abstract pages, whether to create hyperlinks to the authors list on the abstract pages, and whether to make links to the schedule on the abstract and indices pages.

For a sample program which shows the how the different pages work together, click here. To change the appearance on the program pages (e.g., font sizes, colors, character formatting, etc.), you only need to change the styles defined in symp_styles.css (or whichever style sheet you point your pages to in the head section). This will require some knowledge of formatting with cascading style sheets HTML, or at least a willingness to experiment. To change the text which appears at the top and bottom of each page (e.g., the conference title, logo, etc.), change the 'header' and 'footer' text of each page using the 'Options' form (see Customization).

The report version of the program has not yet been designed in this version of the Conference Manager, but when it is the interface will be available on the third tab.