Tag Archives: great speaker

Getting value out of conference attendance

Posted on by
21

I’ve been to my fair share of conferences, of all stripes and sizes. I have to say — and this may come across as arrogant — that I don’t get a whole lot out of most of them. A well known blog that I have been reading, called Lifehacker, recently posted about the issue of how to make conferences worth the trip and time. It’s worth reading and then thinking about ways in which you can improve your own conference experience.

A large part of my problem with conference attendance is that I am not the most sociable guy out there. Too many activities with complete strangers can leave me physically and mentally exhausted. (Even too many activities with friends has the same effect.) Another problem for me is that in my experience, too many conferences, particularly in the library world, consist of recycled speakers over and over and over again. While I have never attended them, judging by their publicly available conference schedules, two conferences that I think are pretty egregious in this area are Computers in Libraries and Internet Librarian. Every year it seems like they have the same people talk about variations on the same themes. That is a bit of a turn off. But admittedly I haven’t ever been so maybe my criticism isn’t valid in this case. But I have experience with many others that I actually have attended such as ALA, where this is true. A third complaint I have with conferences is that too much of the time speakers tout what they are doing and how innovative and the “latest and greatest” a certain thing is, and it isn’t. Too often, what I hear about at conferences is something that I already have experience with in my own library setting or know quite a bit about.

I want to go to conferences to learn new things, to hear more detail about things that I have only heard or read about, to stimulate my thinking beyond the boundaries of my own particular sphere of knowledge or work experience. I want speakers who challenge me, who are good presenters, who encourage attendee participation. I want the conference location to be accessible for non-conference activities if possible, to have pervasive (and FREE) wireless connectivity, and to provide ample opportunity for me to get away from it all for short periods of time to recharge my batteries.

One of the things I do when planning to go to a particular conference is to look closely at who is giving a particular presentation and not so much at the topic of that presentation. Maybe that seems odd but at this stage in my career, interesting topic + great speaker is the ideal but interesting topic + bad speaker is always trumped by not so interesting topic + great speaker.

I’m tired of the same old, same old at conferences. The thing is, conferences are really, really expensive these days. I think I have a right to have high expectations for something that I (or sometimes, but not always, my employer) am paying a lot of money to attend. We need new and innovative conferences models in the library world. From the conference organizer’s perspective, I fully realize how much work and effort go into making one successful, and how much can be ruined by pure chance (like bad weather). But I will continue to look for ways to get a better return on my investment. As a result of this outlook, for instance, I don’t ever bother going to an ALA event; they aren’t worth the cost at all to me.

A quick conference trip to Washington, D.C.

Posted on by
Reply

For the past few days I’ve been on a quick conference trip to a meeting in the Washington, D.C. area. The meeting was organized by NISO and was entitled “From Discovery to Delivery: Solutions to Put Your Content Where the Users Are.”

While there was nothing new or startlingly different about the content of the meeting, for me, at least, I think it was a worthwhile trip overall. The best part of the whole workshop was attending Dan Chudnov’s presentation on “COinS, unAPI, and a Plan for Zero Configuration Service Discovery.” Dan is a great speaker; humorous yet thorough, with an ability to easily explain some pretty technical stuff in a way that most people can understand. I was not surprised to see that he uses a Mac (way to go Mac lovers!) and I liked his use of Keynote for his presentation. The transition theme he used seemed to bother a few people and one person loudly remarked with a sneer, “Looks like a Mac application.” (Get a life, Windows lovers.) What I particularly liked about the approach Dan took with his talk was that he made it Lego-like, that is, piece built upon piece built upon piece, until he reached the (pardon the pun) piece-de-resistance, zero configuration service discovery. His vision for making things completely simple for users, with no configuration necessary for them and no need for them to know about the technical magic that lies behind the user experience, is truly invigorating. The basic focus he had was on using OpenURL and combining it with several other “off-the-shelf” standards to make it dead easy for users to navigate to resources they need. One of the technologies he highlighted was Apple’s excellent Bonjour application for auto-discovery of networked resources such as websites or printers. He also brought up the example of Apple’s iTunes and how it easily allows users on the same network to discover and then play shared music libraries. Overall, this was a great presentation and I am very thankful we have someone of Dan’s caliber to push the technological boundaries in our profession. I wanted to introduce myself to him but didn’t get to do that before the end of the meeting.

Andrew Pace of the Technically Speaking column in American Libraries and author of the Hectic Pace blog, was also in attendance and it was the first time I had seen him in person and heard his by now well-travelled talk about what NCSU has done with its Endeca-powered online catalog. Andrew also is an engaging speaker. I didn’t learn much that I didn’t already know about the work he and others have done but it was interesting to have it presented in person anyway. I wish that I could have spoken with him and others there about the work I am involved in regarding integration of my library’s online catalog with another commercial search engine, work that I think might be interesting to others because it makes new uses of library data that are different than what I have heard is being done anywhere else.

A third highlight of the event was a presentation from someone from the National Academies Press who talked about the challenges and changes they have implemented in providing improved resource discovery for materials they publish. Michael Jon Jensen gave the presentation and he is their Director of Web Communications for the National Academies and Director of Publishing Technologies for National Academies Press. Under his direction this entity has done some really interesting experimentation and development of ways to improve access to the 3,600 books they publish, including development of their own clustering results. One of the things he said that most stood out to me was that National Academies Press provides their books for free in HTML form but they charge for PDF versions. The reason for charging for PDF is that, as he put it, our society still values and treasures the framework and “ethos” of the printed book. Those aren’t his exact words but I think it captures the idea he put forward. He said that a printed book is worth more than the individual pieces, it is bigger and better as a whole collection contained in one package. I thought this to be a very interesting perspective that has important ramifications for how we present and deliver information in an increasingly e-only world.

Jane Burke, former CEO at Endeavor and someone with whom I have always gotten along, was also there as a presenter and it was nice to chat with her for a while and to hear how she is doing in her job leading Serials Solutions.

Finally what made the trip special was the chance to catch up with old friends, Janet Lee-Smeltzer and Tom Wilson. Janet works at UMBC and Tom worked until recently at University of Maryland, College Park. Each night they picked me up from my hotel and we had dinner together and talked far into the evening about librarianship, Web/Library 2.0, library politics, and many other topics.