DIY Librarian

I just finished posting the program for APLIC’s 2009 Annual Conference.

I look forward to this conference every year, and I think this year’s conference will be particularly good. While APLIC is geared toward population information professionals, the range of topics for this very small conference is impressive: data confidentiality; author’s rights and open access; delivering user training; China demographic data and GIS; ROI for libraries; and tours of ICPSR, the University of Michigan’s vast data archive, and the Ann Arbor District Library. (I’m not responsible for this great line-up, just for getting it up on the web site.)

I’m also looking forward to having the conference on the University of Michigan campus instead of in a big-city hotel. It’s always an intimate conference and I think it will be even more so this year.

If you’re interested in attending, the 3-day conference is a bargain – $200 ($75 for students) includes all the sessions and tours plus a banquet.

Back in December, Walt Crawford asked the PALINET Leadership Network Challenge group what conference besides ALA offers the most value as a leader or future leader. John Dupuis, a science librarian, suggested that librarians should go to the conferences their users go to:

I hope there’s room for a dissenting idea–that we should go to the conferences where our users go and not just to library conferences. I’ve been to three non-library, science conferences this year and they were really valuable experiences because they helped me understand where my user community is coming from.

I couldn’t agree more. One of my favorite library conferences is the very small APLIC conference. It is so small, in fact, that it is a pre-conference event of the academic conference that most of our users go to (the Population Association of America), which makes it relatively easy and inexpensive to stay for the academic conference. When I attended my first PAA conference, I found myself nearly bored to tears, in part because so much of the material was beyond my understanding. The faculty and graduate students I saw seemed surprised to see me at “their” conference, which made me feel uncomfortable.

By the end of the conference, though, I’d begun to realize its value.

My users were surprised to see me there in a good way. The same way we get excited when faculty take an interest in the library, they get excited when we take an interest in their research. I got to know many of them better through the social parts of the conference, too.

While much of the conference was still over my head, I was learning–both about the subject matter and the way research works. The best part, for me, was hearing the discussion during conference sessions, because I started to understand how scholars develop their research and interact with each other. I also began to develop an understanding of the publication process and the concerns scholars face at various points in their careers.

I got to see firsthand what a poster session is like, so I can better advise graduate students when they come to me for help putting together their first poster.

I can’t afford to go to an academic conference and a library conference every year, so I try to replicate these experiences as much as I can when I’m on campus. I go to brown bag lunches and seminars. I read my users’ journal articles. I go to department social events (it helps that I work for the research center and not for the library, so I get invitations).

Even if you have no hope of getting the funding to diversify your national conference experience, there are surely local events you can go to to meet your users on their own turf.

It’s conference season again, and I’ll bet that most conferences will include a session where attendees can work on their elevator speeches.

I worked on mine at the SLA Leadership Summit in January, but it hasn’t gotten much use since our elevator’s been on the fritz. (It’s difficult to talk about much of anything when you’re climbing 6 flights of stairs.) I’ve decided that instead I will work on my plane speech.

After the last few conferences I’ve attended, I’ve sat next to a talker on the plane. The talker invariably asks lots of questions upon learning that I’ve been at a library conference.

Aren’t libraries obsolete? Isn’t everything on the internet? What do I think of Google? What do librarians talk about at library conferences?

This is a perfect opportunity to talk about why libraries are important, the good and the bad of Google, and dispel a few librarian myths (why yes, I do have a master’s in that). I have a captive and interested audience. I’ve just been at a conference talking about all of these issues.

After attending the APLIC-I conference this year, I sat next to a man who was curious about Google. Having just heard Siva Vaidhyanathan talk about the Google book scanning project, I was prepared to talk about the pros and cons.

If you sit next to me on the plane coming back from SLA, watch out! If you don’t want to know about libraries, you might want to bring a book, or break out the crossword from the in-flight magazine.