Presenting to an audience workshop with Tania Barry and Julia Leong

The ALIA New Graduates Group in Victoria is holding a series of professional development workshops for library students and new librarians to help prepare for life beyond library study. We're covering how to apply for a job, how to impress in an interview, and what makes an engaging presentation.

The 4th New Librarians Symposium (NLS4) is coming to Melbourne in December. For many librarians, this is a chance to have a first stab at delivering a conference paper to an audience. To help inexperienced and fledgling presenters prepare for this event, Tania Barry from Wyndham Library and Julia Leong from RMIT joined us in August to talk about how to present to an audience.

Tania gave her first presentation at neXt 2005, the National Library and Information Technicians Conference, three years ago. Since then, she has presented at many events including NLS3, and she is the convenor of NLS4.

When presenting a paper to an audience, Tania highlights the importance of:

• making eye contact with the audience
• talking about your notes, not to them
• the need to condense a full conference paper into a 20-30 minute presentation means only selecting the key points

Tania also gave us a useful tip: to keep track of where you're up to in the presentation and what needs to be said in conjunction with each slide, print the slide in a large font and file it in a display folder opposite your notes (also in a large font for ease of readability). Then, when you've covered all the points in your notes, you'll know it's time to move onto the next slide.

For more information, see Tania's slides from this session and a podcast from her presentation.

Julia took a very different approach for her discussion, which serves to show that methods of presenting to an audience are as diverse and unqiue as our personalities. Julia confessed that she suffers from nerves during public speaking, and she confided in us how she has learned to overcome---or at least disguise---her fear.

Julia's tips for giving a memorable presentation:

• don't apologise to the audience for nerves or inexperience, as this undermines the audience's faith in your authority
• you may ned to choose between delivering an erudite presentation and engaging your audience
• minimise the amount of text on each slide to help keep your audience's attention

For more information, listen to Julia's podcast from this session.

The ALIA New Graduates Group Committee would like to thank Tania and Julia for their time, and RMIT Library for providing the venue and catering for the event.