Presentation Season Is Almost Upon Us

With the ACRL conference nearing I would imagine that a good number of presentations are being assembled right about now. I don’t know if ACRL still holds that workshop on how to do an effective presentation for the people who got their papers accepted – it was a couple of hours that focused on how to put together a decent PowerPoint slide presentation – but based on many of the ACRL conference presentations I’ve sat through I don’t think many folks took advantage of it.

For those who are preparing PowerPoint slides for their presentations, here’s something better than that old ACRL workshop. It’s a twenty minute video presentation from a guy who has a lot of good suggestions for what to avoid and what to do instead when preparing your PowerPoint presentation. The goal is to keep the presentation basic, keep it to one idea per slide, and to focus on telling the story. Take a look:

I think there are a good number of ideas in here worth paying attention to. But let me add my number one pet peeve for librarian presentations. DO NOT spend the first five or ten minutes talking about your library or your institution, who works there, how many students you have, what your curriculum is like, etc. If you have something to show us – just show it. Do that first, get my attention focused on the stuff I came to hear you talk about, and then tell me the story about how you did it and what happened next. Enjoy the video.