Kathryn Greenhill has a solid post over at Librarians Matter on getting the most out of in-person conferences. To my mind, there’s a need and space for big conferences (which help sustain organisations, and which provide publishing opportunities for professionals), and room for a myriad of other professional events. In librarianship, there are a already number of large annual and biennial conferences (organised by libray associations, Information Today, etc), camps (Libcampoz, NPSIG camp, Mashed Library), hybrid conferences (NextLibrary) one off seminars and events, online conferences (Handheld Librarian, Library 2.0), webinars, specialist conferences on any number of topics, and on and on and on. There is no lack of choice about where to spend your professional development time and money.

Over the years I’ve been fortunate to attend several conferences, many of which I paid for and others for which I received grants or was supported by my employers. Some really stand out in my mind for the reasons that Kathryn also mentioned: content that was new to me, well-delivered, and with time and space to discuss with other conference attendees. Others stand out for the wrong reasons: poorly organised, unoriginal content.

Lately I’ve been attending more events outside of libraryland. Some of the best and why:

Copyright seminars: Chatham House rule. Speakers are more confident to share failures, and more frank in debates. Being unable to blog or tweet focuses your attention on what’s actually happening in the room.

Lectures@LSE: Free, public events, oftentimes delivered by the kinds of authors you might see at a big conference like Information Online or ALA. An easy way to dip into something new without comitting to a whole day or event.

Improv workshop: And now for something completely different. Kathryn’s post suggested that some people would like to see an audition tape for conference speakers. I think that’s a terrible idea, but we should all see communication skills as necessary in our professional toolkit, and sharpen them reguarly.

I’m looking foward to attending Dev8D and the Open Rights Group conference in the next few weeks, as well as some ICTD talks and meetups. These are all cross-disciplinary, and I will probably find other librarians at each one. Why don’t we throw our camps and talks and events open, put them on meetup.com and invite other professions in?

When we do get together, how should we make the most of it? Some ideas:

1. Stop tweeting. Conference tweets are very difficult to do well, and mostly look like a stream of jumbled half-thoughts out of context. Trying to craft tweets distracts you from what’s happening in the room. Make notes, but make sure to listen more than you broadcast.

2. Be together with different people. If you can, skip a couple of local conferences and save your money to attend one in a different city, state or country.

3. Choose the right event. Or something different.

4. Consider getting involved in organsing the next one.