June 24, 2024
Reflecting on the 2024 LPForum COVID policy
By Melanie Schlosser
Multiple groups within LPC spent months developing a COVID policy for this year’s in-person Library Publishing Forum. Now that the event is behind us, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on how the policy was developed, how it worked in practice, and the feedback we received from the community. I hope that this blog post, in conjunction with the policy itself, will serve as a resource for other conference planners.
Policy recap
Our COVID policy was designed around three principles:
- As the organizers, we have a responsibility to provide the safest possible conference for our community. In the same way that we provide attendees with chairs to sit on and meals to eat, and speakers with microphones so that everyone can hear them, it is our job to provide attendees with a safe conference environment.
- Each attendee has a responsibility of care to the rest of the community. This principle is grounded in our community Code of Conduct, which lays out an expectation that community members will follow health guidelines.
- The policy needed to be flexible enough that attendees could determine which precautions were possible for them without having to disclose private medical information to conference staff and other attendees.
Once these principles were clear, the policy itself was fairly straightforward: we would provide masks, tests, supplemental air filtration, and boxed meals that could be taken outside; and attendees would manage their own COVID precautions (encouraged by copious and emphatic messaging before and during the conference). There is more detail in the full policy, including a list of precautions that we encouraged attendees to take, but the overall message was that everyone needs to do their part.