Thing 15

Seminars, Conferences and Events

Hm, okay, this is a tricky one for me! Being relatively, um, young(?) I feel I haven't much to talk about (I seem to be doing several things wrong already!) But anyway, I can talk about some non-librarian related things too...

In terms of having attended conferences, my only real experience is the libraries@cambridge conference in January. I guess the best thing I did before attending that was carefully reading through the programme and deciding which bits would interest me most. I guess I did make the mistake mentioned in Katie's blog of taking lots of notes, however in this case I found it particularly helpful to me as I then went on to write up the event for the CATALOG website, which my poor memory would have not allowed me to do without! Beforehand we also created a poster for the displays viewed between seminars and over lunch, and I felt this made me a lot more interested in general about the conference, and thinking about what else others would talk about/create posters for.

Presentations are something I have some experience of doing, although not in my past year here in Cambridge. I find them terrifying to do, but that does have the advantage that I prepare so much for them that they usually go okay! However, all my presentations to date have been on physicsy/mathsy topics, so maybe it is a little different when it is library related.

Finally, I do find there are conferences cropping up, especially in the CILIP Update magazine, which I would be curious to go to. Money is usually the case for not thinking twice about going to them though, even if somehow they are free they turn out to be in Newcastle or somewhere equally far away! I am always interested in attending seminars and talks within Cambridge, especially when they discuss topics such as social networking and the move into 'the digital age'.