[Web4lib] Attending/Presenting at conferences in difficult times

[John Fereira]

a.j.p.van.den.brekel at med.umcg.nl wrote:
> International conference on emerging technologies in academic libraries 2010 (emtacl10)
> 26-28 April 2010, Trondheim, Norway
> 
> This is a new international conference for academic librarians, information professionals, academic staff, students, library system developers and suppliers, among others. The conference aims to provide answers to the following questions: What can academic libraries do to address change? How can we adapt? Which technologies can/should/must we use/create? (View the conference programme
> <http://www.ntnu.no/ub/emtacl/?programme>)

This looks like a good conference.  "Unfortunately" I'm going to be 
presenting a workshop at a conference in Montpellier, France on the 
28th. Feel my pain.

Actually, the real reason for responding (although I changed the 
subject) was that I was wondering how others managed to go to 
conferences such as these across the pond (for those of us in North 
America).

I've been on the planning committee for an open source organization 
(Jasig) conference for the past several years and the registration 
numbers for our upcoming and previous conference are way down.  Most 
institutions just won't foot the bill to send people to conferences. 
Over the past couple of years it seems that almost every conference 
announcement I see eventually has a "registration deadline extended" 
post so I suspect that conferences in general are getting lower 
attendance figures.


At my library I can essentially attend only one library funded 
conference a year (my attendance at one in Montpellier is being paid for 
by an external source).  Do ya'll pay your own way to some of the 
conferences that you attend?  The Handheld Librarian conference last 
year and the one upcoming have set a pretty good precedent for how 
effective a virtual conference can be.  Is that the direction that we 
will be going?  While I made a lot of good contacts through the last 
hhlib, those face-to-face encounters just can be duplicated virtually.