We are all very excited about the conference next week, to speak to our 
peers and to hear what our peers have to say!

I would like to suggest that those presenting be considerate to your 
audience, and actually prepare your talk in advance!

You may think you can get away with making some slides that morning 
during someone elses talk and winging it; nobody will notice right? Or 
they wont' care if they do?

 From past years, I can say that for me at least, yeah, I can often tell 
who hasn't actually prepared their talk. And I'll consider it 
disrespectful to the time of the audience, who voted for your talk and 
then got on airplanes to come see it, and you didn't spend the time to 
plan it advance and make it as high quality for them as you could.

I don't mean to make people nervous about public speaking. The code4lib 
audience is a very kind and generous audience, they are a good audience. 
It'll go great! Just maybe repay their generosity by actually preparing 
your talk in advance, you know?  Do your best, it'll go great!

If you aren't sure how to do this, the one thing you can probably do to 
prepare (maybe this is obvious) is practice your presentation in 
advance, with a timer, just once.  In front of a friend or just by 
yourself. Did you finish on time, and get at least half of what was 
important in? Then you're done preparing, that was it!  Yes, if you're 
going to have slides, this means making your slides or notes/outline in 
advance so you can practice your delivery just once!

Just practice it once in advance (even the night before, as a last 
resort!), and it'll go great!

Jonathan