One important element of the Bangkok Conference is the "poster sessions" -- approximately 2000 (!) mounted posters with (in most cases) authors standing by. The posters represent a rich source of current material not found anywhere else. While it is hard to quantify, posters certainly represent a major percentage of all "content" at the conference.

Unfortunately, useful posters are hard to find (the guide book lists two thousand abstracts with no capability to search), and more importantly, once the conference is over the posters are gone.

One team I met from the US Census Bureau was frustrated by this issue in years past, and so they have a novel idea. They brought a team of three staffpersons with the responsibility of photographing as many posters as possible, developing the film, scanning the pictures, putting together the mosaic of pictures for each poster, writing descriptions of each poster, and putting all of the information into a database which might later be put online. It's a huge amount of work, but in their view worth it given the value of the information. It certainly is better than nothing and I applaud them.

But wouldn't it be easier for conference organzers to simply invite electronic submission of all posters? Or maybe they have them already from the application? Most posters are derived from Word documents, and those that aren't reside in various graphics formats. Why not put those online, make a huge amount of valuable content available, and save enormous effort and money?