At my place of work, we’ve been having discussions about our workloads for the upcoming year, and as part of those discussions, we’ve been asked to consider what professional development opportunities interest us.
Because of these discussions, I’ve found myself reflecting on a blog post I wrote several months ago – the one in which I wrote about bringing something back from conferences. I wrote that we tend to think of “something” as “something neat we can try here.” I thought we needed to expand our idea of “something,” and suggested that “something” might encompass getting an idea of how your library compares to others, or raising awareness of one’s library by presenting about your work there.
In retrospect, I still think my definition of “something” is too narrow in scope – I seem too focused on what the library gets “directly” from their employees’ conference attendance.
I think that all we really need to “bring back” from the conferences we attend is the potential to become better at what we do.
Conference attendance is, in my mind, a personal matter. We do not – or at least, we should not – attend conferences thinking that we are sponges sent to absorb information and then squeeze it out upon our return. We attend them to do our jobs better.
I plan to attend two very different conferences this year. One is not actually a conference, but a seminar – it’s the Interagency Depository Seminar, which is a week-long “boot camp” for government documents librarians. I daresay that most of my coworkers would not choose to attend this seminar, and would not get very much out of the notes I plan to take.
The other conference I plan to attend is ACRL. I go with two aims – one, to present (if my proposal is accepted, that is), and two, to meet network with science librarians from the Science and Technology Section. Although I imagine several of my colleagues also plan to attend, they’ll go for different reasons, and will not get the same things out of it that I will.
What I’m trying to get at is that whether a conference has a very specific focus, or a more general one, one’s motivations for attending can (and should, I think) be very personal. I think the question I was dancing around in the aforementioned entry was: is it okay to attend conferences for personal reasons? And I think the answer is yes. I think we should attend conferences for personal reasons.
And I think we should bring those reasons back. While the minutiae of panels attended and notes taken can be useful to colleagues, let’s talk about the whys and the wherefores first. Let’s talk about why we choose to attend particular conferences in the first place; let’s talk about what we hoped to get out of them, and whether we did. Let’s talk about how these conferences fit into our work responsibilities, or our professional aspirations.
As a library director (18 years in two different places) I’ve always strongly supported conference attendance for a host of reasons — and a very important one is that personal/professional development. Whether it be through presenting, participating in committee work, attending formal sessions or hanging out in the bar or at receptions with old friends or colleagues just met, attending conferences provides a broad array of ways that will hopefully make you a better, more informed, more creative and even more curious librarian. If you bring back a specific idea that helps a particular project that’s great, and we do a lot of formal and informal sharing of our conference experiences, but it’s the immersion in your professional networks that is the number one reason I’m willing to spend as much money as I do on making sure as many people in my library get to conferences as possible (bad budget year coming up, so we’re cutting way back, but that’s temporary). Coming back from a conference with a great idea to share is wonderful; but coming back one intangible step closer to being the most brilliant librarian you can be is priceless.
I have very different reasons for attending different conferences….more general conferences, like Annual, I attend more for the networking and social aspects. I get to meet new people and talk to all kinds of librarians about all sorts of things. It’s a very general “what’s going on in the world” sort of thing for me.
The very focused conference that I attend, Electronic Resources & Libraries, I attend specifically to do my job better. I am the only electronic resources librarian at MPOW. This conference is usually the only chance I get to talk to other ER librarians, and I usually learn a lot about the specifics of my job and how to do it better. There’s socializing too, of course, but not nearly as much. It’s more of the “sponge” mentality, even if I’m not sharing the info with anyone else when I get back.