Hello there. My name is Chloe. Long time conference lurker, first time participant.
In the language of the internet, a ‘lurker’ is someone who observes online forums or communities without actively participating. This is the way I have approached conferences until recently…hovering at the fringes, without much direction or purpose.
In June, I attended the Canadian Learning Commons Conference in Sherbrooke, Quebec Canada. CLCC is a relatively small conference, attended by US and Canadian delegates who work in the specific niche of Learning Commons (or, in our case Research Commons) library spaces. Attendees are not only librarians, but also writing center directors, IT help desk coordinators, and space designers. The smaller scale and specific focus of this conference allowed my boss (Research Commons Librarian, Lauren Ray) and I to dial in on some very specific aspects of our service model for a presentation that we delivered, and to get some very granular advice about best practices from our colleagues.
The last time I participated in planning and delivering content for a conference, I was still an MLIS student. But It’s really nice to feel that I have something to offer in terms of professional practice, rather than student research alone. Another difference is that, since I am not currently job-seeking, I could allow my interactions with the other delegates to be more relaxed and natural, rather than tinged with desperation. It was nice to know that I might have something to offer THEM (like a valuable contact, or idea for a best practice) rather than just the other way around.
With that in mind, I feel like my conference impressions bear some special weight this time around, as I was in a much more receptive state of mind to receive them. Here are a few selections:
Pre-Conference:
I got very lucky here, because the pre-conference was directly relevant to my professional duties. The topic was “Training and Mentoring Peer Learning Assistants, Peer Tutors and Learning Commons Student Assistants,” presented by Nathalie Soini and Caleigh Minshall from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. The presenters gave a lot of practical advice as to how to foster engagement in our student workers. The session gave me lots of ideas, and was a good reminder of what an important job student workers have to do, and that we literally cannot function without them.
Our Presentation:
Overall, I think that Lauren and I did a great job with our presentation. Again, it was nice that our audience already understood the Research Commons concept, so that we could get right to the meat of our presentation without too much exposition. We carried the 45 minutes we were allocated fairly well, and received positive audience feedback. In preparing the presentation, I really came to understand the value of Lauren’s mentorship. She has given lots of conference talks, and has a very structured approach. While I am certainly capable of organizing 45 minutes worth of thoughts into a coherent presentation, Lauren’s sense of time management around the project was invaluable, as was her commitment to making the final product polished and clear. Before the conference, we were required to submit an abstract for our presentation. We worked hard to refine this, and it expressed what we wanted to say pretty concisely. One important thing that Lauren reminded me to do, was to look frequently (whenever we added new slides, or ad-libbed new language as we practiced the presentation) back at the abstract we had written, to make sure that we were staying on track. It would be very disappointing for the audience, we reasoned, if they made a decision to forgo a concurrent talk and attend ours, only to find that our presentation was only loosely related to what we had promised in the abstract (and who hasn’t been to a conference session like that, frankly.)
Other Presentations:
I attended a wide variety of other presentations over the course of the three day conference. One highlight was a keynote by David Woodbury from the Hunt Library at North Carolina State University. NCSU Libraries are really innovative, and it is was great to get some ideas from their practices.
Another nice thing about this conference…probably due to its size and supportive character, was that a few presenters gave talks that included detailed information about “failures,” challenges, and things that had generally Not Gone Well at their libraries. While it requires bravery to deliver this sort of a presentation, it was so much more valuable for the audience to hear them!
For the curious, all of the presentation abstracts and many slides (including ours) from the conference can be viewed here.