Building the Program: Creating Sessions

What are Sessions?

Sessions are parts of the conference programme that take place

• on a date
• at a time
• in a place
• with a content (type of presentation: invited oral, contributed oral, poster, etc.)

The data entered into the screen

• Scientific Program Administration / Sessions

is used to build session codes, which are the first part of the programme codes (programme codes are session codes plus a sequence number). Programme codes are unique identifiers of contributions to the conference programme.

Programme codes help participants to understand the scheduling of contributions to the conference programme. They are used to identify the files of contributions uploaded and downloaded to the proceedings via the upload/download scripts, so care should be taken to keep them meaningful and as short as possible (maximum 10 digits, but 6 or 8 is better).

Before creating sessions, it is necessary to have entered data into two other screens:

• Scientific Program Administration / Presentation Type (Sessions)
• Scientific Program Administration / Location Codes

More about presentation types (contribution and session) and location codes.

With the presentation type and the location, it is possible to build the session codes, which constitute the first part of the programme codes.

Creating Sessions

In the sessions screen:

• select the presentation type
• select the day - the days of the week are visible in a popup list
• enter a start time
• enter an end time
• enter a title - the title of the session, entered manually, can be related to the content, for example, simply using a description such as: "Opening Plenary Session", or "Awards Session", or using the topic, for example, "Session on Technology", etc.
• select the location
• enter a sort order for the place of the session in the overall conference programme.

In SPMS, go to General / Reports / Sessions to generate a list of sessions showing the title, classification, date, time, location, presentation title, and speaker and affiliation.

Sort the Sessions within the Conference Schedule

Sorting the sessions within the conference schedule is used for the production of reports, the programme booklet, abstracts brochure, etc.

Before entering the sort order mentioned above, it is useful to have a table of the conference schedule in hand when creating sessions. Number the sessions in the order in which the sessions should appear in the programme throughout the duration of the event. Use digits such as 10, 20, 30 etc., which leave space if new sessions are added later.

Begin numbering from the beginning of the conference, session by session throughout the day, followed by the next day, etc. For parallel sessions, it is usual to sort the sessions by location numbering all presentations in one hall, morning and afternoon, followed by the parallel session in a different location, morning and afternoon.

Entering this information will gradually build a programme code in the top field "Session". Assigning a digit to session code for each contribution will result in unique programme codes for each contribution.