At a few of my most recent talks I’ve had attendees complain that there were not handouts. I tell them at the beginning of the class that I’m going green and the slides are available online for people to print if they want – but that they can view them online whenever they want – and they still complain!! I don’t know about you, but most of my class handouts go into the recycle bin after I blog about the session – why keep them? I have it all documented and linked here. Librarians (and probably lots of other people – but I mostly see librarian) seem way too wedded to their paper! We need to learn to use some of the new tools available to us instead of wasting paper.
To that I give a hearty “Here here!” I’ve stopped doing handouts of any kind these days — a downloadable PDF of slides and a clickable bibliography works well for me. I was tickled to see SOLINET give each attendee a jump drive with all the conference resources on it. Good idea! Here’s to more conferences goin’ green.