Ekatius: Extending the Reach of Your Meeting Content!

Preserving meeting content has never been more important than now. Medical research is dying a quick death post-meeting when it could assist with ground-breaking research and ongoing education long after the meeting. Previously, there has been no unified database or resource available to access legacy event knowledge, making presentations, papers and abstracts difficult and time-consuming to locate for association members and impossible for end-users. The only way an end-user could find archived material would be either through their membership with an association that digitally captures and archives its personal meeting presentations, or by stumbling upon it. Considering that the average four day conference contains nearly ten times that time-frame’s presentation material, a serious amount of education risks being lost. This poses a serious distribution and discoverability problem for associations looking to expand the exposure of their science.

Ultimately, the indexing of event knowledge in appropriate search engines is a decision left to the owners of the content, namely the sponsoring association. But when done, it enables the scientific, medical and technical (STM) communities to access previously unknown information from multiple associations where and when they need it. In 2005, the American Heart Association (AHA) needed a tool that would, among other things, make their Scientific Session event available on the Internet. By utilizing the components of the Content Discovery Suite (primarily, Ekatius™), the scientific content from their event was placed in a permanent, searchable repository with other STM content and as a result exists and is readily accessible today. Within their first year, this meeting’s content yielded hundreds of page views, and thousands of page views have been tracked since. Even though that meeting was five years ago, the content lives on today.

Ekatius™ is an event knowledge dissemination platform that aggregates and disseminates event knowledge elements such as abstracts, posters, and rich media presentations. It provides a permanent content library giving science presented at meetings a longer, potentially indefinite shelf life. The Ekatius™ platform has advanced search functionalities that allow users to search for event knowledge elements either within a specific event or across several events, thus yielding a cross-disciplinary view of the latest knowledge on a given topic. Social networking capabilities, such as social bookmarking, are also available with Ekatius™, which allow users to bookmark and share their bookmarks with others on popular social bookmarking sites such as Digg or Del.icio.us, increasing collaboration and knowledge sharing within and outside the association. These components give associations the ability to maximize the exposure and impact of their meeting content to an audience beyond the physical confines of a given meeting.

A bridge can be created from meeting content in its syndicated form on Ekatius™ to the per-access or subscription-based Archive site, allowing content to reach a wider audience. This provides an opportunity to collect non-dues revenue and drive membership on otherwise dated content, ultimately increasing an association’s bottom line. By capturing and disseminating their event knowledge, associations get far more mileage out of their conference programming—and subtly promote those conferences by giving web browsers a taste of what they have missed. Content today translates into new profit and members tomorrow.

Ekatius™ can help to increase your meeting’s exposure by disseminating your association’s event knowledge to a global audience. By integrating with the OASIS Content Discovery Suite – Archive, Capture, and To-Go – Ekatius™ can create a path for future customers, members, and partners to find their way directly to your meeting content, and indirectly to you as the sponsoring association. Meeting content remains accessible and relevant long into the future allowing your association to extend its meeting content’s reach further than ever, creating the best opportunities for science.