I was wondering if the veterans here have a way of dealing with such large volumes of highly meaningful input generated in short time?
We normally attend one conference a year, our state Wool Growers conference that is over 3 days where there are presentations form all sorts of government officials, scientists working on various projects related to issues the sheep industry faces and reports on more local issues and problems and more. Plus the meals, and meet and greet time always result in me getting handfuls of business cards from various folks. I always come back with page after page of notes, handouts, cards and other stuff. They can include references to scientific papers that I may want to read, there are people I want to remember, recipes I want to try (we're fed lamb for all the meals and the chef school in Denver sends the winners of their top classes to come cook for us so there are lots of new things to try) and so on. Probably not the same level of input as your conference but similar in types of materials.
What I do is I put everything in a folder labeled for that year and file it in my tickler system for review a week later. That gives me time to get the sheep flock and farm work caught up, digest the info and be ready to process it.
When I do get the folder out I read through all my notes while at my main computer with internet access. I usually find that I can nearly always trash all my notes on the government reports as they nearly always are able to be easily found on the internet, are often not of immediate use to our flock and are subject to change over time. I sometimes bookmark the location if it's a recurring report or summary location but only rarely do I have anything that I need to save as reference or that I need to do from that class of presentation. Papers to read are nearly always able to be slotted in to my existing list of things to read that is organized by topic. So a published paper on the latest in Guard Dog interactions with wolves in WY goes into the Guard dog list. I will read the synopsis and make a note of the link or source on roughly how useful I think it will be. Ditto for a paper on the latest Scrapie research and also that on OPP. From the scrapie presentation I often have to read those as I am a producer member of a Federal Scraoie Review board so I need to keep up with what is going on as we are charged with profviding feedback to the feds on what they ned to do to change or modify the scrapie program. So anything I get on scrapie is likely to result in a few real next actions to explicitly read proposed policy X to determine how it will affect small rare breed flocks and flocks that export sheep with a deadline of either the time for comments or the next meeting of the committee. Recipes are reviewed again for whether we will actually make them, ones that need lots of fiddly bits won't get done no matter how tasty they were at the conference. I always come away with lots of business cards, Those all go into my Farley File with notes about the person. I've found that over the years the various people and presenters move around and having a history of meeting with them at this conference gives you an in later when you deal with them again in a new position or area of interest. Those connections are often the most useful part of the conference for me so I prioritize getting them all into my Farley file system. I also find that in some cases the info presented directly slots into an existing project. For example when Temple Grandid came and talked to us I already had a project to redo the sheep sweep as it didn't work right. I was actually able to show her our tentative drawings, she gave us some pointers on changes she would make and we were able to implement them. Since then our sheep sweep system has worked extremely well and the issues we were having are now gone. Some things actually go into my sheep scrapbooks, a few pictures and maybe a page on the highlights of the conference. I do keep the agenda with the names of the presenters in my files for reference later. I look at the past years agenda's maybe 2-3 times a year so not big. I am considering moving them from paper files into scanned and OCR'ed digital files for easier searching as I invariably have to search through most of the years' folders to find the reference I want but that is the only change I am really considering.
This year we already know we will not be attending the conference unless there is an on-line version and it's not even clear that there will be a conference so I am not sure how my process will change.
So bottom line my suggestion is to put everything in for a detailed review later after the initial conference enthusiasm has worn off and be ruthless in trashing stuff that you really won't need again or is readily available elsewhere.