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

Citation

Upton, J. (2009), "Presentations for Librarians: A Complete Guide to Creating Effective, Learner‐centred Presentations", Library Management, Vol. 30 No. 4/5, pp. 343-344. https://doi.org/10.1108/01435120910958002

This book professes to be a “complete guide to creating effective, learner‐centred presentations”. That is quite a big ask of a 189 page book! Content is structured into two parts and three appendices covering common presentation software packages, as the book focuses specifically on multimedia presentations.

Part one entitled “Human learning and learning from presentations” devotes 13 pages to human cognitive architecture in an attempt to help the reader understand how people learn. Readers starting at the beginning of the book could easily give up before making it past chapter one, which would be a great shame. I felt this chapter would benefit from a rewrite and better layout. There is important information here but it is difficult to digest in its current format.

Two smaller chapters follow, using vignettes to describe bad and good conference presentation experiences. The author analyses these experiences to understand the components that make or break a presentation from the audience's perspective. Readers will find the vignettes particularly useful reminders that the value of a presentation, like beauty, is in the eyes of the beholder, i.e. the audience. A successful presentation is one that clearly presents information to learners in creative and memorable ways and helps them to organise, analyse and use the information.

Part Two, “Creating a learner‐centred presentations”, takes the reader through the presentation process model. This provides a systematic way to prepare a successful presentation and covers eight chapters. The model begins by assessing audience needs and determining goals then moves through storyboarding, creating slides and handouts, practicing and delivering your presentation and finally, evaluation. It would be particularly useful for those who have not given presentations before, or whose bad experiences have led them to vow “never to present to a group again”. The step‐by‐step approach will ensure the presenter's initial focus is on their audience and goals, with issues about slide layout and content coming later in the process.

Individual chapters are well written and contain easily digestible amounts of information. As such, the body of the book is easy to “pick up and put down”, enabling the reader to focus on one aspect of their presentation before moving on to the next chapter. This makes it particularly useful for the busy librarian who is multi‐tasking and needs to work on their presentations in and around other commitments.

There are varied opinions from presentation experts about what constitutes “best practice” with regard to the amount of text on presentation slides, the use of images, length of slide headings and usefulness of laser pointers. While readers might not agree with all the author's opinions, Lee Andrew Hilyer invites would‐be presenters to consider the impact of such factors on their audience.

Of the 189 pages in the book, 60 pages are devoted to appendices. These provide basic user guides to Microsoft PowerPoint 2007, Apple Keynote Version 3 and Open Office Impress Version 2.2 software packages. The appendices give presenters additional skills in translating the material in the book into their own presentation using one of these software packages.

Overall, I thought the book made a useful contribution to ridding the world of poor presentations. However, despite its title, it is not a complete guide to multimedia presentations, but more of a “beginners' guide” which would be valuable to librarians who have little or no experience in preparing learner‐centred presentations. After reading this book, librarians should understand the components of a good presentation and have the practical skills to prepare their own.

Accompanying the book is Hilyer's blog. Unfortunately the link to this has changed in the months since the book was published, but there are redirections in place to the new blog available at: http://presentations4librarians.wordpress.com/ It is updated regularly and is a great companion to the book, providing an opportunity to comment on topics covered in the book as well as access to really useful items like Hilyer's presentation worksheet.