In general, the IUISC Conference comprise of presentations from the academic community at large. Speakers from other communities may be invited to talk at the conference, but would not normally be asked to talk about overtly commercial aspects of their business.

Sponsorship opportunities provide the possibility of speaking at the conference, ether as a plenary speaker or in one of the parallel streams. The following guidelines are provided so that the speakers can understand the attitude of the audience and that mistakes in presentation material of previous events can be avoided:

The talk should not be overtly commercial, certainly not a sales pitch. Clearly if your company makes only widgets, you will probably be only able to talk about widgets, but you may be able to couch the talk in terms of how university X deployed your widgets and how they benefited from them.

A talk which brings in a member university would be of better value than a straight presentation. Consider having a co-presenter from a university to talk about the product.

Identify the target audience at the start of the talk; say whether it is a technical presentation or a general introduction to a technology. Try to have an informative title or abstract, if your talk is about an MIS topic, you need to attract staff working in this area. However people should be attracted to your talk if you make it sound interesting.

The attendance at the IUSC comprises staff from the Library and IT sectors of the universities and other 3rd level institutions on the whole of the island. A broad cross section of staff attends, from the newest member of staff to hardened veterans. Companies who only do business on one side of the border should take this into account when preparing their presentation.

The IUISC should be a great opportunity to talk to a focused set of Library and IT staff but you need to tailor your talk to the academic nature of the audience. Some attendees will recall how some companies tried to make their session a sales pitch and ended up doing themselves, and their company, a disservice by this.

If you would like to talk to one of the Programme Committee about your presentation and how to ensure its success at the IUISC Conference, then please contact them ahead of the conference.