Presentations for Librarians: A Complete Guide to Creating Effective, Learner‐centred Presentations

Citation

Calvert, P. (2008), "Presentations for Librarians: A Complete Guide to Creating Effective, Learner‐centred Presentations", The Electronic Library, Vol. 26 No. 4, pp. 607-608. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470810893846

Information managers must give presentations quite frequently on a wide range of topics, and do so to a variety of audiences. They need to speak to and convince stakeholder groups such as funding agencies of the need for more resources. They need to present plans and policies to parent organisations, and to staff. They will give presentations at conferences and workshops. Sometimes they will speak to outside groups as a public relations exercise. Each sort of presentation poses different challenges because the audiences vary from small to large groups, they have different expectations and knowledge, and the purpose of the presentation – that is, what you want to have achieved at the end of it – will vary according to the situation. Yet although presentations are a significant communication tool for information managers, many avoid giving them as much as possible and don't learn the basic techniques needed to do them successfully. Perhaps this is due to having an introvert personality, apparently common amongst librarians and archivists, but really that is no excuse. Presentations have to be done, so it follows that they ought to be done well.

This book is exactly what I hoped it would be. To put it another way, it is not another manual on how to use PowerPoint, for there are already more of those than we need. The real merits of this book are found in part 1, called “Human learning and learning from presentations”. Here we are told about relevant aspects of human cognition, such as the channels we can use to absorb information, the types of memory we have, and how we turn new data into knowledge that we can use in practice. The author has done this at just the right level, in my opinion: not too technical, but with enough detail so that we can apply this to our own presentations. For the point is that we can very easily overload members of the audience; if we wish to “inform” them then we must avoid the awful “data dumps” that sometimes pass for presentations. For to “learn” requires an active state of mind rather than a passive one, so a good presenter engages the audience rather than talks at it. We also need to remember that a presentation is linear and members of the audience have very little chance of going back over what has been covered, unless they are provided with handouts to read afterwards. Here Hilyer makes a very good point; if members of the audience are taking notes during a presentation they are actually adding to their cognitive load, so this should be discouraged. It is when he makes points such as that one, and when he talks about the horrors of trying to engage an audience straight after lunch, that one realises he speaks from experience.

Part 2 is on the more familiar territory of creating the presentation, but once again the author avoids getting stuck in a rut by giving examples using Keynote and Impress as well as PowerPoint. There are many sensible points made here that, if followed, would help presenters at all levels to do a better job. He advocates an early consideration of the topic and the audience before doing anything else, and then a focus on the key points that need to be emphasised. With that done, other techniques such as storyboarding and writing a script will follow quite logically.

One thing that I could say about this book is that the title is rather misleading. I can't see that this book is either specifically for librarians, or couldn't be used by readers who are not librarians. There are occasional references to familiar topics, but by and large this is a fairly generic book on giving presentations that will now sit next to one of my other favourites, Antony Jay's Effective Presentation (Financial Times Management, 1999). I recommend this book to all information managers, wherever they might be.