Updated: August 1, 2022
With our events just ten weeks away, CLIR is sharing our current thinking about health and safety at our upcoming conferences. To review earlier announcements of this nature, visit the News section of our events website.
First, we want to be clear that we take your health and safety seriously. We regularly monitor what other conferences are doing to keep people safe and what they are and aren’t getting right, both with health protocols as well as communications about the protocols. It’s important to us that we provide you with policies to which we can stay true, which is to say, we don’t want to make promises we can’t keep. The pandemic landscape continues to rapidly change with fluctuating infection rates and new variants, but it’s important to us that our events are as safe of an environment for you as they can be.
While we are not at this time able to make guarantees about our actions just yet, the precautions we’re considering implementing at our events include:
- Requiring or strongly suggesting attendees be fully vaccinated and boosted before coming to our events;
- Requiring or strongly suggesting attendees wear high-quality (N95 or KN95) masks in all session rooms except during meals and breaks;
- Requiring or strongly suggesting attendees rapid antigen test before, during, and after our events;
- Providing presenters with clear face shields to wear while presenting;
- Setting rooms to encourage distancing (removing and/or spacing chairs);
- Communicating transparently with attendees if we learn of a positive test at one of our conferences;
- Requesting that hotel staff interacting with our guests on the conference floor wear masks; and
- Providing additional hand sanitizer stations throughout the venue.
We will continue to monitor public health numbers and we’ll re-evaluate in early to mid September, when we’ll provide an update on our plans. We may decide to implement certain protocols depending on infection rates at the time.
At least two weeks in advance of the events, we’ll have our final guidelines in place and will share them publicly. While we understand that this late date may complicate plans for attendees, because of rapidly changing conditions, we must wait until closer to the event to officially finalize our protocols. At this time we’ll also share Maryland and Baltimore City public health guidelines.
We appreciate your patience with us as we navigate this truly complex landscape. If you have any thoughts or questions you’d like to share, please reach out to us at forum@diglib.org.
Thank you.
– Aliya and Team DLF