Conferences Stating the Bleeding Obvious?

In another stunning post this week, Annoyed Librarian shares this gem:

A couple of years ago I got frustrated with the mess the ALA Council sometimes is, so I searched Google for “blog,” found Blogger, typed a few keystrokes, and the AL was born. With some good librarian guidance from the bloggers that be, I could have saved myself a lot of time. For example, I could have gone straight to Blogger instead of through Google, thus saving myself 0.12 seconds. Otherwise, it ain’t that hard. Even I have a blog, and according to some of my critics, in addition to being a warmongering fascist, I’m also a luddite and a technophobe. [*]

I’ve been lucky enough to speak at a range of conferences on 2.0 - from local Cilip meetings and the NCVO conference through to Internet Librarian International and Online. I start most presentations by stating that I feel a bit of a fraud, in some ways, since I would never have been part of the audience I’m addressing - I would never have thought “there’s this new trend going on - how can I incorporate it in my library?” It’s just not how my brain works.

My recent presentations on finding the time advocate keeping up with new trends … but I wouldn’t be spending £800-£900 plus VAT to do so. Part of my feeling of luck in being asked to speak at conferences is in having the registration fee waived in return for my 30 - 60 mins talk.

However, that’s not to be dismissive of the audience. What I have observed since I started speaking is that most individual audience members come along not to learn how to blog (they could follow the Annoyed Librarian’s route to that, after all) or to operate 2.0 software, but to see how blogging etc. could potentially provide real benefit to their users / clients / customers.

This surprised me at first. Librarianship is all about the users, after all - or should be - and I’d have said that one of the advantages we have over general web writers is our proximity to and understanding of our user group. So, I was a bit surprised when librarians - good, user-centred librarians at that - found it helpful to have it spelled out to them that blogging is an ideal channel for current awareness services (new books, news, events, etc.) I was worried at my first conference because I felt like I was being rewarded (free conference place etc., etc.) for stating the bleeding obvious.

Now I have realised that, with falling staff levels and other cuts, the librarians at the sharp end often lack time (and perhaps energy) to think strategically about research and development. And many services seem to operate in a culture where the person mooting a new idea is charged with investigating or implementing it, on top of their normal workload.

I despair of conference presentations and papers that imply that 2.0 is the answer for every issue in every library and of experts who don’t actually operate in a real-world information service - in the UK at least, our top experts are free-lance or university research department-based. That’s not to put them down - they are wonderful people full of great ideas, some of which I have benefited from myself - but the balance at conferences should be more representative of the profession as a whole, with the bulk of speakers, I think, facing the same sorts of pressures as their audience. Practitioner speakers for practitioner audiences.

The gap in the UK 2.0 conference market is not in presentations describing the technology or enthusing the audience for new ideas, but in taking the audience member by the hand and demonstrating whether or not 2.0 could provide solutions / time-saving in their service, and if so, how.

As the Annoyed Librarian puts it so well in reference to the Computers in Libraries Conference, “My library already has computers and we all know how to use them.” [*] To be of value, library IT conferences need, I think, to do a little bit more.

Ref

Annoyed Librarian. ‘Old New Hot Things’, Annoyed Librarian, Wednesday 9 April, 2008.