Introduction

Overview

The Conference Manager is a MS Access application designed to help conference organizers deal with the scheduling of a small to medium sized academic conference. A MS Access application is a regular Access database with tables, queries, forms, etc., but which also has some custom made forms and programming to facilitate the performance of specific functions, such as data entry, printing, or creating web pages.

The Conference Manager is designed to help you organize paper sessions, which are the focus of most academic conferences. More specifically, it has features to help organizers:

• receive abstract submissions from a web-based form
• review submitted proposals and prepare draft emails to authors
• print out cards for grouping papers into panels and sessions
• assign papers to panels and sessions using the patent-pending "Panel Builder"
• print out schedules for individual rooms, complete with equipment needs
• create summary statistics, such as the number of papers per institution
• create a conference program in either HTML or printed format

Note that the conference manager is not designed to keep track of attendees at a conference (although this feature may be added in the future).

Terms and Concepts

There are many terms and concepts used to describe the elements of a conference: papers, talks, presentations, posters, abstracts, panels, sessions, plenary, etc. These terms are common, and seemingly straight-forward, but often represent different events at different conferences. To use the Conference Manager effectively, you need to understand how these terms are used for the purposes of this application.

• Paper. A paper is a generic name for something presented at a conference. A paper can be either be in the form of a talk or a poster (a large printed format hung up for display).
• Proposal. In the Conference Manager, a proposal is the information submitted by a potential author describing a paper they would like to present. May also be called a paper submisssion.
• Abstract. In some conferences, the term abstract is used synonomously with paper, presentation, or proposal. But in the Conference Manager, the term abstract only refers to the one-paragraph summary of a paper or poster which is usually submitted with the proposal and will often appear in the program.
• Panel and session. Papers, whether they are talks or posters, are grouped into panels, which are often guided by a moderator. Panels are then grouped into sessions. A session may have multiple panels going on at once, in different rooms, in which case they may be referred to as concurrent panels. Sessions in the Conference Manager may also represent activities other than panels, and may therefore be better thought of as a time slot in the schedule. For example a session may represent a break, a field trip, an administration period (e.g. registration), or a plenary talk.

The following partial outline of a conference demonstrates the hierarchy of sessions, panels, and papers. Note that this outline just shows the conceptual structure that the Conference Manager uses to organize a conference schedule. When the schedule is actually printed or output in HTML format, there are many ways to customize its appearance.

Conference Outline Showing the Nesting of Sessions, Panels, and Papers

Day 1

Session 1: Registration
Session 2: Plenary
Session 3: Morning Presentations I

Panel 1

Paper 1
Paper 2
Paper 3

Panel 2

Paper 1
Paper 2
Paper 3

Session 4: Break
Session 5: Morning Presentations II

Panel 1

Paper 1
Paper 2
Paper 3

Panel 2

Paper 1
Paper 2
Paper 3

Session 5: Lunch
Session 6: Posters

Panel 1

Paper 1
Paper 2
Paper 3
Paper 4
Paper 5
Paper 6

System Requirements

To use the Conference Manager, you need to have Microsoft Access 2000 or later. Although no specialized knowledge of database design or programming is needed, in order to make changes to the features of the Conference Manager it may be helpful to have some knowledge of Access, including form design and Visual Basic for Applications. One can also create new queries or reports and add them to the menu system. This users guide should provide enough information about the data structure of the Conference Manager to allow users familiar with MS Access to design their own reports, queries, and new data entry forms, and add them to the Main Menu if desired.

One of the most useful outputs of the Conference Manager is the conference program in HTML format. The HTML program is designed to be highly customizable, including customizable headers, footers, and styles. But to take advantage of these features one needs some knowledge of the HTML language.

About the Conference Manager

The conference manager was developed by Andy Lyons, a graduate student at UC Berkeley, for the 5th Annual Bay Area Conservation Biology Conference in February 2003. For more info, please email alyons@myrealbox.com.