By Angela Ossar, Government Information Analyst

If you’re like me, you leave almost every conference with your head spinning and a to-do list so long that you have to create a separate list just to organize that list. (And if you’re like me, you may or may not have a running Google Doc called “Planning Plans” where you just plan to plan things. Oy.)

This is normal, right?

Well, this is why we started recapping the conferences we attend:  to take that multitude of innovative ideas and case studies and try to make sense of it by writing it all out and, in the process, share it with our readers.

To be perfectly honest, the 2013 e-Records Conference left my head spinning even more than usual.  I took notes (see the image to the right if you don’t believe me) but the “make sense of them” task is a real challenge this year. Luckily, you’ll have no fewer than four TSLAC  analysts (plus our conference organizer, Nan Pfiester) recapping the conference this year.  And between you and me:  those guys got the hard assignments.

The theme of this year’s sold-out conference was Transitioning to Electronic Processes. The conference sessions adhered to that theme well, tackling topics like….

• What’s next in Government Technology:  Marianna Symeonides will recap the keynote speech by Texas Representative Larry Gonzales, in which he discusses the importance of public-private partnerships (PPPs) in advancing government and education.
• Transitioning to electronic posting of municipal meeting notices: Angela Ossar will share a case study of how the City of Austin drastically improved its efficiency and Texas Open Meetings Act compliance by streamlining posting processes, optimizing their content management system, and utilizing citywide naming conventions.
• Transitioning from shared drives to SharePoint:  Marianna Symeonides will recap a case study of the Employees’ Retirement System’s transition to SharePoint and the nuts and bolts of preparing for and executing that transition.
• Transitioning from paper to digitized images: Michael Reagor will discuss how the Texas Parks and Wildlife’s Infrastructure Division’s digitization of architectural drawings enabled quick responses after natural disasters like the recent flooding of the visitors’ center at McKinney State Park.
• Best practices for implementing an imaging project: Erica Wilson will tackle questions like “How much should you really digitize?” and “Is it important who does the scanning?”
• Transitioning from traditional communication strategies to social media implementation: Erica Wilson will talk about the now-published Social Media Resource Guide and planning an effective social media strategy.
• Processing, Storage, and Search of e-Records:   Nan Pfiester will share thoughts on best practices that permit both e-record archiving and attendant algorithms that define document retrieval from an archive to an immediately accessible document.
• Preserving access for e-records: Angela Ossar will close out the recaps with one of her favorite subjects: ongoing access to electronic records and some of the challenges of digital preservation.

Recaps will be presented as a series of articles here on the blog. All of our conference recaps can be found under the Conference Recaps category (a subcategory of “Education” above).

Conference presentations will be posted on the e-Records Conference 2013 website within the next week, so be sure to keep an eye on that site. We will make an announcement on the blog when the presentations have been posted.

Please join us as we recap the 2013 conference on The Texas Record, and please comment to share your own take-aways!