Other Conferences for Professional Development

Edit: Transcript available at http://bit.ly/1xvLyz6 

Other Relevant Conferences for Professional Development #medlibs chat
Thursday, October 9, 2014
9pm Eastern/6pm Pacific
Hosted by Emily Hurst (@hurstej)

From MLA to ALA each year librarians make the march to their professional meetings but what other job related conferences could librarians consider attending? How many of us have looked at the conferences and topics outside of “library-land?” Join us on Twitter Thursday night to find out!

Attending conferences focused on academic instruction, curriculum design, emerging technology, or a specific discipline can broaden a librarian’s perspective of their professional environment. Through conference attendance librarians can learn more about emerging trends in a specific discipline and come away with a better understanding of the faculty, students, or staff they serve. Information professional have always been quick to adapt and apply new strategies for information seeking purposes and learning about relevant issues is can be achieved by attending conferences outside of librarianship.

As the technology coordinator at the NN/LM SCR Emily J. Hurst, MSLS, AHIP has attended many meeting both inside and outside of the library realm. While the main focus of many of the conferences Emily has attended has been technology focused including SXSW Interactive and EDUCAUSE she has also participated in many discipline specific meetings including FENCE (http://www.eatright.org/FNCE/) and NCCHC (http://www.ncchc.org/). Emily is an avid tweeter and frequently shares the information she is exposed to at these meetings with others on Twitter. In Thursday’s chat Emily will guide us through some conferences to consider as well as some thoughts on justifying your attendance and how to stay involved via online sources.

Emily has been to a few conferences

Topics include:

• Wait?! You mean there are other conferences to attend not just ALA, SLA, PLA and MLA? How can I find out about these other conferences? Are some of these local?

• I actually learned something! Can I go back? A look at which conferences participants have attended and found useful.

• Writing justifications: How do we justify the need to attend meetings outside the scope of what may be seen as our profession?

• I can’t get funded to attend in person: Online sharing sessions and recaps of the top events. Yes! There really are ways to find out about conferences without attending.

• Get on the agenda and present at the next conference! Why not? It’s possible!