Thing 15 Professional Events

Thank you to CPD23 for this one. I find that attendance at any professional events, be they Conferences, Training or local get togethers, are the life blood that keeps my enthusiasm for the job going. Without them I would feel extremely isolated working in a school library. My favourites are the big conferences such at Lighting the Future this June which I was fortunate enough to attend. The mix of discussions, authors, workshops and networking was second to none. I only wish my employer had paid for the entire weekend and not just a day. With budgets ever tighter, I do accept that this is a luxury, but salaries are not big either, so I can see the writing on the wall for the big boys. However, training sessions are just as valuable. Again, I was lucky enough to have funded a day in London to attend one of Phil Bradly's training courses on Web 2.0 tools and technology. I came away buzzing with ideas from that one, and several new contacts to network with in the future. This course was relatively inexpensive, put on by Tower Hamlets School Library Service. My local SLS has been cut back and cut back and so haven't been able to support many training courses in the last couple of years. Our only option is to do this ourselves. I did manage to put on a short training/information session led by our Public Library who have a really good online information service. I invited all the local area school librarians to come along. It was quite successful. My only advice is just as with an author visit, this needs all your 'ducks in a row' to be successful...and test the technology before everyone arrives! I have also hosted local Librarian's get togethers or Teach Meets. Again, this is informal but needs a bit of organising of place, technology & refreshments. The next step for me is to go into speaking at a conference. But as CPD23 suggests, what can I speak about? More thought needed there. NB I love the link to webpages on the Thing 15 page on presentation. Very amusing and useful! Another conference that has caught my eye is the Information Librarian conference in October. However, even with the CILIP discount, this is too expensive. I feel that the way forward has to be online webinars or video conferencing for professionals, and indeed online e-learning such as this course itself, in order to bring costs down. They do exist, but a clearer path to finding out about them is needed. Maybe CILIP could help here. However, the downside of this is the lack of face to face networking which cannot be underestimated. How else do you have the re-inforced idea that 'you're not alone' out there. I'm afraid the Blog & Forum community can never do that for me!