[Web4lib] Attending/Presenting at conferences in difficult times / Dissolution of Reference

[John Fereira]

K.G. Schneider wrote:
>  
> There's nothing wrong with a book or article, but dollar for dollar, a
> good conference is a far better value for quickly gaining knowledge in
> emerging library services and technologies, and peer engagement is the
> very best form of continuing education. 
If I may offer an example.   A couple of years ago at a Jasig 
conference, we combined an opening day drinks and snacks reception with 
poster sessions.   As I was wondering around with a beer and a plate 
full of snacks and stopped in front on someone demonstrating a 
commercial app (I don't recall what it actually did).  Someone else was 
watching and asked how the content was getting displayed.  It turned out 
that the demo was being done with a bare bones Drupal installation.  The 
other person watching said he was really interested in Drupal but didn't 
know a lot of about it.  The guy giving the demo then started showing 
how various bits of Drupal worked rather than continuing to demo his 
app.  It's those kinds of peer engagements;  where the discussion can 
evolve from one topic to another, that you can't duplicate in a book, 
and would be very difficult to duplication at a virtual conference 
(although backchannel twitter/IM streams can fill in that gap somewhat).

> To answer John's original question, I would imagine that people who
> value conferences are hoarding their conference pennies to make them go
> as far as possible; airfares did not decline with the rest of the
> economy, and the U.S. dollar is a bit puny these days. 
Are you talking about hoarding personal pennies?   Are you spending your 
own money to go to conferences?  I suppose that if I could convince 
those that hold the purse strings to significantly increase my salary I 
wouldn't need to rely on a institutional travel budget to fund 
conference attendance. 
> I hope that
> improves, because international engagement is also invaluable. I look
> back on my 16 days in Oz two years ago as one of the best learning
> experiences in over two decades of library work. 
In the domain where I often work international engagement is crucial.  
I've just recently started working on another collaborative project with 
the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N.   Fortunately, pretty 
much all conference related activities that I engage in are funding from 
grants and other external sources. 

-- 
John Fereira
Cornell University
Twitter: @john_fereira
Google Wave: fereira at googlewave.com