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With the swearing-in of the 44th president less than a week away, we know that inauguration coverage is on your mind. Whether you'll be reporting on it from D.C., or following it from your newsroom, you'll be keeping an eye on the event. That is why we hosted a live chat Jan. 13, from 1-1:30 p.m. EST to discuss best practices in interactive, multimedia coverage of this year's inauguration.

In the first half of the conversation, people asked Andy Carvin, NPR's senior product manager for online communities, and Erica Smith, an online journalist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, about projects of theirs.

• Carvin and the NPR staff will enlist users using social media to contribute to inauguration day coverage. You'll be able to chat with Carvin about mobcasting and using Twitter, Google maps and other social media tools in your inauguration coverage.
• Smith helped STLtoday.com create a multimedia package that includes a full-text archive of every inauguration speech, multimedia of many of the speeches and graphical analysis using tag clouds and graphs. You can talk with her about the in-depth project and get insight into the research that went into creating it.

I asked Smith a few questions about this project and STLtoday.com's other multimedia inauguration coverage. Here is an edited version of our e-mail exchange.

Ellyn Angelotti: What went into the preparation and planning of this project?

Erica Smith: After the election, I got together with a co-worker to brainstorm ideas for Inauguration Day. And then, of course, other more urgent things cropped up, so inauguration plans were put on hold. Most of the prep work was research -- finding speeches, finding videos (I was surprised a few more of them weren't out there), finding images that we could use, etc. We'd created word clouds from the presidential and vice presidential debates, and a lot of people really liked those, so I created word clouds of the inauguration speeches too.

You have pulled together a ton of resources dating back centuries. Who in your newsroom was involved with pulling these resources together?

Smith: Me. I pretty much took this on as my little project.

What suggestions would you give to other journalists looking to tell the story of the inauguration using multimedia and interactivity?

Smith: Start early. There were a couple of late nights to get this posted when I wanted and to make sure everything worked. And spell check.

In the second half of the chat we heard about your news organization's projects and ideas for inauguration coverage. Also, we shared resources that will help you follow and cover inauguration day, and get ideas from others. Click below to read the chat.

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Previous stories about the inauguration:

• Poynter to Update Election Book with Inauguration Front Pages
• Economy Forces New Governors to Trim Inauguration Costs
• Half of Charter Buses East of Mississippi Heading to Inauguration
• Even News Orgs With Shrinking D.C. Staffs Want to Be Players on Inauguration Day
• Sortable Obama Inaugural Donations Available Online
• Abrams Proposes Three-Month "March to Inauguration" Subscriptions
• Rebecca Walsh: History is More Real on Paper
• Inauguration Tickets Hard to Come By
• Crush of People Heading to the Inauguration