In the past the posters from the annual meeting have been available in PDF form on a website. Well this year MLA is introducing interactive posters.


This year, MLA is excited to have partnered with Trapeze Media Solutions, a small business out of the University of Utah, in an exciting new effort to display your poster electronically. In addition to presenting in the regular poster session, the PDF of your poster will be displayed on interactive kiosks at the conference. These kiosks will allow other attendees to view your poster throughout the conference.

The kiosks will allow attendees to browse posters, search for keywords, and even ask questions and provide feedback. When an attendee selects your poster, they will be presented with a full view. When they click on any section with the mouse, that section will zoom in and allow the attendee to read the detail. Another click will zoom the poster back to the full view. A menu allows the attendee to switch between your poster and abstract and the text from both your poster and abstract will be indexed for searching. In addition to this new way of presenting your poster online, this new service can allow for more interactivity than printed posters, so you will also have the ability to include additional functionality.



The following things can be added to posters:

• Movies, audio, PowerPoint presentations, and animations and attach them to specific parts of your poster


• Include datasets and attach them to graphs or charts on your poster.


• If a method and dataset is available, other researchers will be able to use that data and method to validate the results. Or they can use the data and their method. (Before making any dataset available, ensure that it is HIPAA compliant and allowed by your institution and IRB.)


• Additional documents can be attached to specific parts of your poster.

Wow this is like the posters are beefed up and on steroids. I really like this idea. In particular I like the idea of being able to ask questions ahead of time. All too often the poster sessions are chaotic and inevitably I never make to all of the posters I want to make it to. This allows me to contact and ask questions of all the posters I am interested in.

Labels: Annual Meeting, Hawaii, MLA, Technology