I’ve been to a couple of conferences in the last month (I won’t say explicitly which, although you could probably figure it out pretty easily), and while I had a great time at each, I left feeling a bit unfulfilled in the “OMG! exciting new ideas!!!” department. I make a big point to do a lot of professional reading and generally stay up-to-date on technology trends, so by the time I get to a conference the sessions are usually familiar to me. They tend to be about general technology trends and how they impact libraries, or projects that are already fairly well written-about. These are interesting, but not anything new to me. I’m not blameless in this either, I’ve also given presentations on things that anyone could have learned about with a subscription to a few blogs.
Don’t get me wrong, I still find it incredibly valuable to attend conferences like these because I get to meet and network with great people. It just leaves me feeling disappointed when I follow a conference tag on twitter and see people getting so excited about the new things their learning, and I’m just sort of nodding along.
It seems like I just need to look for conferences that will offer different types of material. This cold just be larger, broader conferences – I’m looking forward to ALA Annual because I can attend sessions on topics outside of my normal areas of interest – as well as more technical conferences. Any suggestions from the crowd? I think ASIS&T may be a good place to start, I would have loved to go to their conference this year if I could have worked out the scheduling.
Or I guess I could just stop doing so much professional reading! (kidding…)
0 Responses to “Conference Reflections”