The one where we don’t attend the regional library conference

Ah, how good it is to be a librarian – right now I am reading the Artemis Fowl fantasy series while sitting at the library desk. To hide what I am reading, I have wrapped the book in a fake cover with “Library 2.0 – Hype or reality?” on it. On every page I frown, pretend to scribble something on the page or highlight a paragraph. This way nobody notices I am actually reading for fun, and librarians are supposed to read of course. Anyway, I was supposed to network and have fun at the annual regional library conference, but the central training approval team denied my request.

Every year I have to fill out a proposal to attend the regional library conference and submit that to the central training approval team (a bunch of HR control freaks). When I just joined the company, I innocently asked permission to attend a national library conference like ALA or SLA. In those days I would actually go over to a person in the office to request permission, so I had the opportunity to see them snicker at my request. “A national library conference? Gee – three whole days? What do you talk about? Books? Hahaha. Forget it”.

Nowadays the process has improved as everything goes through web forms, so I am spared the in-the-face humiliation. I was however allowed to attend the regional library conference every year, as long as I drove back and forth every day since the company would not fund lodging.

This year the central training approval team was thrilled with the global credit crisis – another reason to deny more outside training! Another argument to turn down training requests and save money! They actually suggested to that instead of attending the conference, I would buy the conference proceedings and “acquire the learnings” that way.

Oh come on. Conferences to me are 25% about the presentations, 10% about seeing the latest and greatest from the vendors, 15% about being away from the office and 50% about networking. Conference proceedings capture less than 5% of the conference value, as usually they are just prints of the slides which are meaningless without the actual talk.

And while I am on the topic of presentations at library conferences, I think we should do a greatest hits conference. I see quite a lot of the same presentations every year, usually with a different template or title, but the essence stays the same. Also, there are some classics out there that I would love to hear again – some have reached cult level in library-land.

So why don’t we do a “Library conference – the best of 1980 – 2010” next year?

Why cataloguing is still relevant in an online world (1993)
Fighting the “shushing” and bun stereotype (1985)
Why we are so much better than AltaVista (1996)
Library 2.0: more hype and fluff to make us seem hip (2005)
This whole web thing is just a hype and will never go anywhere (1994)
End user tagging: the beginning of chaos (2003)
Taxonomies – the next big thing to save our profession (2002)
CompuServe - the primary information network (1985)
Dialog command line searching – obscure tips and powerful tricks (1981)

As networking is for many attendees the most important aspect to a conference, I would have breaks every hour, plan long lunch breaks and bars everywhere to hobnob.


Disclaimer: this post and all others are the product of the authors' imagination and any resemblance to real situations is purely bad luck. This article does not reflect the thoughts or opinions of either myself, my company, my friends, or my Hello Kitty socks.