Thing 12: Conferences

I have been to my fair share of conferences, seminars and workshops over the fifteen years I have worked in the library. When I first started going, I used to squirrel myself away in a corner and not talk to anyone, or if there was anyone from my library there as well I used to stick to them like a limpet!

Networking pretty much terrified me, walking up and talking to complete strangers who I felt knew so much more than me was enough to put me off going in the first place!

The librarian would say to me that I needed to be more confident and to get out of my comfort zone, which I already knew, but found difficult to do.

After attending a couple of events I realised I was seeing a few of the same faces there, and as I got more experience working in the library I began to relax and realise that I did know stuff and could also speak about it!

At the same time I was managing our journals collection and going to Swets events and AGI meetings and getting to know more and more librarians.

So I decided that whenever I went to a conference/seminar/workshop I would make it my business to introduce myself to at least one person that I hadn't met before and spend time talking to them, about them and, about me and what we all do. Don't get me wrong, I still find that difficult to do, but I have met lots of lovely, knowledgeable people that way, that perhaps I would never have met!

I am very lucky in where I work as we are actively encouraged to attend events relevant to our position/department or area of expertise. I now manage the library Reception Desk and User Services so anything I attend is geared towards that, the most recent course I attended was: Innovation Day at Maynooth University: New Spaces and New Models for Frontline Services.  which was held in October 2015. This was a really fun day - during the morning we had some lightning talks which gave an overview of frontline service provision, and in the afternoon we held a World Cafe - I had never heard of this before but it is a great way to get people to mix and mingle and bounce ideas off of one another other.

I always try to take notes and write them up or put them in some sort of order as quickly as possible otherwise I just forget everything! We did set up a CPD blog a few years ago, but it was very hard to get people to post to it as it wasn't a requirement of attending the course.

I used to tweet from  events I went to as well, but I found I ended up missing so much because I was too busy tweeting - most events have a dedicated tweeter now anyway so I just do a hashtag search later to find out what people were most interested in and I also check out the videos or powerpoints when they are posted online.