Attending Conferences - Thing 12

Reading through the post from Rudai 23 on attending conferences, it struck me that I haven't attended a conference in a number of years. So I couldn't really complete task 1 of this Thing, which was to write about a conference I had attended.  I'm sure that the Rudai team want to read about a conference which has been recent and not one that falls into the 5-10 years ago bracket.  So I opted for the 2nd task:

• Identify a conference or seminar you'd like to attend
• What challenges do you anticipate?
• What are your expectations for the event? What will it give you?
• What are your fears about attending the event?

I usually flick over the information about conferences. If I'm honest, I'm not fond of conferences. Two of the reasons for that are that I don't really like to travel (even if for just a couple of days) and I'm quite shy. I find networking a really challenge and the thought of walking into a room where I don't know anyone is actually quite terrifying.

But I went looking for conferences I'd be interested in. The problem is that at this stage of the year, you only know that a group/organisation is planning to hold a conference; not necessarily what the conference is on. I identified 4 conferences that I would consider going to, topic dependent.

the CONUL Conference
the Academic and Special Libraries Conference (section of the LAI)
the Joint Conference between the LAI and CILIP Ireland
the Health Libraries Group conference (last one 2014, so anticipated that there will be another one in 2016)

I expect to have challenges in terms of funding. Attending conferences can be an expensive business and budgets being tight means that funding is not always available. I would have to be sure that I would really get something from the conference if I was to pay for it personally. If a place was funded by my employer, I would also expect to maybe have to make a case to attend - prove that there was something of value on the programme that could be fed back into practices in the workplace, and I would be expected to cascade information on my return.

My expectations for the event are usually over-shadowed by fear so it's difficult to pinpoint what these are. I would be attending because a couple of topics on the programme appealed to me so it wouldn't just be a jolly day out. At the very least I would expect to come back with a free pen....seriously though, I would expect to come back with a few simple ideas that could be implemented back in my library/workplace. At the very most, I would want to come back with a number of contacts about a particular project we have been wanting to implement in my workplace, or an idea of how to solve or approach a problem that has been hounding us. It's always very useful to tap into someone else's experiences and pitfalls about a particular project, technology or hardware.

You might have guessed that the majority of the conferences I identified are all reasonably local geographically speaking.  Only the HLG conference would be held outside of Northern Ireland or Ireland. This kind of addresses my dislike of travelling. The other big one is shyness. I read both links re how to network in the Rudai 23 post, and can identify with both. But both gave some really useful advice about how to approach this and deal with it. It isn't so much the conference but it's the downtime - the coffee breaks, the lunchtimes that I'd be worried about. I thought the post by Dawn Rasmussen in Careerealism was particularly accurate. I'm afraid I have been that shy limpet - the person that clings on.  If I can get over that, anything else will be a bonus.