Presenting opportunities at library events, and how to get them

The Short Version of this post 

Want to present at library events? Want to know how others go about getting speaking engagements? The basic answer is, it's who you know. Don't despair though - it's not a closed club or a clique. You very quickly get to know people by putting yourself out there, answering calls for papers, organising events yourself, and blogging so people know your views and interests. 

I asked people on Twitter how they got their library speaking gigs - it was a 'tick all that apply question'. A massive 69% of respondents have got speaking engagements through someone recommending them: this is the most common route. The next most common was knowing one of the organisers (59%); then answering a call for papers was next (53%). The other significant number of votes was for getting asked off the back of other speaking engagements (51%). So really, once you're in the loop, you're in the loop - do a couple of talks and the whole thing self-perpetuates and you'll probably end up being asked to do more. 

For a more in depth look at all this, read on. 

The Long Version of this post

If you're professionally active and interested in librarianship beyond just your own job (and I'm presuming you wouldn't be bothering with this blog if that wasn't the case!) then you might be wondering about speaking at library events: conferences, open days, symposia, training days etc. This post discusses how other information professionals approach doing this - how do you get to talk at interesting events? 

Presenting is something I'd completely recommend doing, and I know a lot of others feel the same way. It's not as scary as you might think (and it very quickly gets even less scary for a lot of people), it can be really exhilarating, and it's great professional development. Presentations are an increasingly important part of many library roles, so it allows you to put a key skill on your CV. Just being on stage to talk about a subject is enough to really focus your mind on learning more about it, so you become more engaged and more well-researched as part of the process of preparing your talk. Plus of course it gets you out there, allows you to meet interesting people, makes networking a lot easier (people come up to you) and you may be able to build a reputation which leads to more interesting stuff. 

The most obvious way of getting yourself on a bill somewhere is to apply via a call for papers. There are loads of these across the course of the year - subscribe to the A Library Writer's Blog and Dolores' List of CFPs blogs to receive regular alerts, and eventually something relevant (and possibly local) will come up; these blogs also contain calls for book chapters and articles. Another obvious way is to join a professional body - CILIP, the SLA, ALA, BIALL, etc etc. As I've said before, it's a great way of allowing you to get involved with stuff which you might not be able to do as part of your current job (but which might help you get your next job..). 

How it's worked for me

I looked back over 26 events over the last 2 years that I've either done or been asked to do but couldn't (or am booked to do later this year). The route of the opportunities were as follows:

• Knowing the organiser(s): 7
• Recommendation: 7
• Reputation: 6
• Via my Twitter account / my blog: 2
• Answered a Call for papers: 2
• Was there for work: 1
• Don't know how they got my name: 1

. Some provisos and caveats: 'Reputation' refers to things like being asked to present the Echo Chamber talk with Laura Woods at Umbrella, because the organisers knew of our previous talks on the topic. So I don't mean that I got booked for my reputation! Just that people knew I (or in this case Laura and I) had talked on the subject or related subject before. Also, the twitter / blog category overlaps with the reputation and the knowing the organiser categories. It's all quite fluid and not as black and white as presented above.

Anyhow, clearly knowing people is useful - both organisers, and people with clout who recommend speakers for things. What often happens is that organisers of an event are organising it in their own time and they really want to get it sorted without too much fuss. So if they have a list of people they know are fairly reliable and have spoken at things before, they'll go right to that list. (There's a danger that this approach can lead to a stale or repetitive round of speakers at library events, but that's a debate for another day.) What I'm trying to say is: in a lot of cases you don't have to be the best, or the most knowledgeable, or the expert in the field - it's sufficient just to be okay at it and then people will come back to you as an easy and reliable option... You just need to take that first step on your own, and make something happen.

How it's worked for others

I ran a quick survey via twitter - so the usual disclaimer about the sample being skewed by their very 'being the sort of people who use twitter-ness' applies... I asked people to tick all that applied in terms of ways they'd got speaking gigs - here are the results from 68 respondents: 

The 8 votes for the 'other' categories were mostly what I would classify as 'Knowing one of the organisers' so in actual fact it's more of a tie between that category and 'Recommendation by someone' than is indicated above. Apologies for my slightly woolly categories, and thank you very much to everyone who filled out the survey and retweeted the link!

To give this a little bit of context, the ages of the people responding to this were as follows: 

• 69% were aged 26-40
• 24% were aged 41-60
• 4% were 60+
• 3% were 18-25

. So for the most part, the twitter poll mirrors my own experiences - it really is a case of the people you're in contact with being the key. That's why networking is so important (both in person and of course online). That said, I honestly believe networking is most effective if you approach it with the question "What can I do to help people?" rather than "how can I develop a network to help me?" - I know that sounds a bit twee but it really does seem to be the case that if you go out there solely with the intention of looking for opportunities, they may be slower to come to you. 

Some tips and other resources

Just briefly here's some related info on a variety of topics. 

Saying no Saying no is really, really hard - particularly to exciting opportunities. But there comes a time where taking more on will actually be bad for you, because to prepare well for a speaking engagement takes time, so it's very stressful if you don't have enough hours available. It's really okay to say no, particularly once you've got a few talks under your belt - in my experience people are generally very nice about it. 

Referring If you can refer the organisers to someone else, do so. Don't just refer at random, but if you know someone who could do a really good job instead of you, then pass on their name and email address to the organiser - it really helps the organiser (they can always ignore the referral, but often they're very grateful) and of course someone you like may well get a great opportunity from it. I once passed on something I couldn't do and recommended someone else - the person ended up doing such an amazing job that they were way, way better than I could've been, so I was really pleased they ended up doing it! I learned more from their presentation than I would've done from researching my own. 

Money There are people who make good money from speaking at library events. I am not one of them. I've only ever been offered one paid key-note, and I don't mind that at all - the fact that your travel is paid for (some people will speak at events for which their travel isn't covered, but that's not something I personally do) and your attendance at the event is paid for is great in itself, because you get to attend something interesting for free. So, don't expect to get paid for a long time - there isn't a lot of money floating around in library-land, and you'll normally have to settle for doing it for expenses, for the experience, and because it's fun. Plus it helps out the organisers out. 

Plus it goes without saying... You'll get more new invitations off the back of previous speaking engagements if you're prompt, courteous, enthusiastic, clear in your communication with the organisers, stick around for the rest of the day wherever possible, don't constantly refer to 'technical problems beyond my control' throughout your presentation, and all the other stuff you know already...

Links Elsewhere on the blog, check out this guide to submitting a proposal, and this guide to first-time public speaking, plus these polemical slides on the basic rules of presenting... There are also links to other people's articles on the same subjects, within those posts.

Over to you So, any more tips for the would-be presenters out there? Please leave a comment and help expand this guide. And if anything I've said doesn't chime with your own experience, I'd love to hear about that as well. 

Cheers!

 - thewikiman

Stop BREAKING THE BASIC RULES of presenting!

Public speaking and giving presentations is becoming more and more important in many career paths. There are nervous public speakers, confident public speakers, and many people who are making the journey from one to the other. But ALL of them could do with avoiding breaking just the most basic rules of presenting - it's amazing how often one or more of these will crop up at a conference, training day or event. I hope this is taken in the spirit it is intended. :)

Stop Breaking The Basic Rules of Presenting (click through for transcript via Slideshare) 

View more presentations from Ned Potter

Incidentally, this is really aimed at people who habitually do all this stuff, without really knowing they do it. If you already know these rules, then you can probably break them and still make a great presentation!

-thewikiman

___________________

Read all the guides I've ever written (to Prezi, Twitter, Public Speaking, Evernote, Netvibes, etc etc) linked from one page.

Thinking of submitting a paper for the New Professionals Conference? Here’s some unofficial advice.

.....

(A lot of this applies to conference proposals generally.)

CILIP have announced details of the 2011 New Professionals Conference, which takes place in Manchester at the University, on June 20th. The Hashtag is #npc11 if you want to discuss it on Twitter etc.

There is currently a call for proposals to present, and I can't recommend highly enough that you do this if you're within 5 years of having joined the profession. You have till April 15th to get something in. All the details are on the CILIP website.

Why present?

It’s a brilliant experience! It takes you out of your comfort zone, it connects you to your peers, it gets you into the conference for free! It’s completely worth doing – I guarantee you’ll feel differently about the profession afterwards, more positive, more energised and more excited.

Subject matter

Important disclaimer: I was on the organising committee last year and involved with choosing the successful papers, but I am NOT involved this year, so these views are just my opinion and are in no way official. Kay?

The most important thing about the subject matter is making it appropriate to the context of the conference. So for example, something about the value of libraries generally might be really interesting and really entertaining, but it might not be as useful for this particular conference as something which the delegates can take away and apply to their own lives, and to their own careers. Think about the utility of what you're saying, and the 'take-homes' that the people watching your presentation will get from it.

Be explicit about the value of your presentation. You have 300 words to play with – I’d probably use 250 to talk about the topic, and the last 50 would start with the phrase ‘this paper will be beneficial to new professionals because…’.

Get a second pair of eyes on it before you send it off – another opinion is almost always helpful.

Format

Same disclaimer as above - this is my opinion, and is certainly nothing official or endorsed by the organisers.

I think, personally, the formatting of your proposal really matters. The organisers of this event are volunteering and doing it on their own time, so there's not always the luxury of a huge amount of time to discuss the proposals. There'll probably be more than 40 decent ideas, and it takes a long time to get through that much stuff. So anything that’s poorly put together is already heading towards the 'maybe' or 'no' piles rather than the 'yes' pile. Of course the content of the proposal is by far the most important thing, but that oft quoted scenario of 'two otherwise equal candidates' actually applies quite often in this type of situation, so don't put yourself at a disadvantage. Poor formatting shows a lack of attention to detail, and a lack of understanding of the assessment process. For what it's worth, here's what I would do if I were submitting:

• Send a PDF - Word docs are only fit for emailing to people if there's a chance the recipient may need to edit it.
• Don't use Times New Roman, use Calibri, Arial or similar, and make it a normal rather than tiny or huge font size.
• Include your name, a short bio and your email address in the document (this does not have to fit into the 300 words - make it clear which section is which). You may have also put some or all of this stuff in the email you send it in, but the chances are the panel will be printing out all the documents and getting together over coffee to go through everything - they don't want to be making notes or printing emails. Put everything in one place for their easy reference.
• It goes without saying, proof-read it to death. Read it out loud to catch mistakes, and don't rely on the spell-check - I still find myself having used the wrong their / there / they're from time-to-time… Americanised spellings are another thing spell-check might not catch.
• Send it to someone whose opinion you trust, and get them to check it over too.

And if you do get accepted…

You’ll be asked to write a ‘full proposal’ by June. This is really just to check you can follow up on your promises and deliver a full paper. It doesn’t have to be written to a journal standard of prose and referencing. When I presented in 2009, I wrote mine up all formally and then a week before the conference, I started to practice delivering it and realised that I’d have to completely rework it. I couldn’t read it out loud as it was (that would have been rubbish) and I couldn’t even just split it up into notes (the tone and phrases were suitable for being read alone, not said out loud to an audience). So don’t beat yourself up trying to write the full proposal – it’d be more productive to write the notes you plan to learn or speak from, and then turn THOSE into the full-proposal, not the other way around. More tips on presenting for first time speakers are available elsewhere on the blog.

All just my opinion of course. :) Here's another one - last year's Best Paper prize winner Bronagh offers her views too.

Good luck!

-    thewikiman

Learning from the Orteig Prize - the sky is the limit for libraries!

It was from this Freakonomics Radio podcast, which I've refered to on this blog before and which provoked a huge number of comments, that I learned about the Orteig Prize. It's a really fascinating story, it inspired the LISNPN competition mentioned in part one of this post, and who knows what else we can learn from it - so bear with me while I go through the events of the early 1920s.

A little history

In 1919, a New York hotelier called Raymond Orteig put up a prize of $25,000 (equivalent to over $300,000 today in pure inflation terms, but actually a lot more in terms of what that money could buy) for the first aviator to fly non-stop from New York to Paris, or the other way around. For the first five years, no one could claim his prize as the technology wasn't advanced enough. But in those five years people worked enormously hard, because that was an enormous amount of money.

Eventually, in 1927, Charles Lindbergh makes the flight successfully, and wins the prize. It took 33.5 hours in a single-engine plane (the Spirit of  St Louis) and was a minor miracle of good fortune allied with supreme skill, but he made it safely to France. Lindbergh was only 25 years old at the time, and he used the massive fame he now enjoyed to promote commercial aviation. He was obviously one of those polymathic people who just operate on a higher plain (no pun intended) than the rest of us - he later became a prize-winning author, an environmentalist (can't of been too many of them at that time), an international explorer and an inventor!

This was of course a fantastic achievement, but the existence of the competition catalysed massive progress in the aviation industry by loads of people, not just Lindbergh himself. In fact, $400,000 worth (in old money) of innovation happened from the combined entries to the competition - and Orteig only had to pay out once! The results of this expenditure were immediately quantifiable - the year before Lindbergh's flight, just 6,000 people travelled by air as passengers; 18 months afterwards there was 180,000 commercial passengers. Even in the months remaining in 1927, the year of his flight, applications for pilot's licences tripled and the number of registered aircraft quadrupled.

(Another ramification of the competition was, as you might expect with experimental air travel, a huge loss of human life. Many pilots died failing to win the prize. Hopefully a library equivalent won't place its entrants in such jeopardy...)

The Legacy

Apart from the 30-fold increase in commercial air-travel, which effectively gave birth the multi-billion dollar industry we know today, the prize had another legacy. Inspired by Orteig's competition, Peter Diamandis set up the X Prize Foundation. This offers a more modern prize of $10,000,000 to achieve huge goals such as commercial flight into space - again, far more than $10,000,000 is invested, in total, by all the entrants combined, so the field moves on apace. Not only that, but the Foundation themselves don't put up the prizes! They are funded by organisations and philanthropists, eager to making progress happen.

The LISNPN competition

As I'm sure you've realised, the LISNPN competition is a very (VERY) small-scale attempt to do something similar. We're offering prizes we think people will really value, and will be willing to work hard and innovate in order to have a shot at winning. Although entrants will retain full copyright of their ideas, LISNPN will be able to show-case ALL of them, and hopefully ALL of them should reach a new audience not normally involved with libraries at all. We're only giving out two prizes (again, put up by generous people who want to encourage the enterprise, rather than paid for from the - non-existent - LISNPN coffers) but hopefully the profession will benefit from lots and lots of advocacy efforts.

Are there other things we can do with competitons and libraires?

So is there scope for more library innovation on a much grander scale, adopting the Orteig prize principles? I think there must be. Other bodies must be able to run other competitions, the entries for which could be public-facing and progressive. I'd love to see one around technology in libraries.

And this links to another thing I've often thought, which is that libraries (certainly in the UK) don't appear to be as good at attracting philanthropy as other comparable areas. We need to be something that rich people and foundations think of when they're wondering where to put their money in a charitable way. Perhaps an innovation inspiring competition is a way to achieve this? What do you think?

In the meantime, good luck with the competition if you're entering.

- thewikiman

Libraries at Cambridge Event

Last week I attended the Libraries@Cambridge event, and it was excellent. Laura and I were due to present on the Echo Chamber together but, in what is rapidly becoming known as The Curse of the Echo Chamber*, once again one of us ran into problems - this time Laura had Flu so I had to go solo. The keynote was from Alex Wade, Director of Scholarly Communications at Microsoft, no less. He designed the search functionality in Windows 7, calling on his expertise in information retrieval, acquired during his time as a librarian. This is an interesting use of a librarian's skills, and another example of the myriad career paths potentially available to the Info Pro. The thing which most caught my eye in his presentation was Academic Search, a free service from Microsoft, which at the moment is in beta. Currently heavy on the Computer Science side of things but soon to be expanded to cover more subjects, it nicely allows the user to navigate to scholarly papers via various different means. It's a very attractive interface, and easy to use: it shows that presenting data in a more visual way really serves a purpose beyond nice aesthetics - here's a screengrab, showing Alfred V. Aho at the centre, and all of his co-authors around him:

If you click on the lines between the authors it shows you how many publications they've co-authored and takes you to them if you want to drill deeper, and if you click on any of the co-authors then the whole matrix re-centres on them. It looks really useful and is perhaps indicative of what 3.0 generation library catalogues could usefully do to make navigation easier for users.

Alex had to rush his presentation as he had more to say than he had time to say it in - he literally skipped 20 or 30 slides. This baffled me somewhat - we all knew well in advance how long we had to talk, so why not tailor the presentation to fit the time? No one HAS to say yes to an invitation to present - if you don't have enough time to prepare properly, time your talk etc, why agree to do it? I was up late the night before, timing my talk, finding it was 3 or 4 minutes too long, and then cutting bits out and timing it again until it was right - because I was honoured to be there, and didn't want to disrespect the audience, the organisers and my fellow presenters by over-running. Turns out I'm quite high-horse-ish about running to time...

Next up was me. I have to say it was pretty amazing to be doing a plenary session in front of 250 people at such a venerable institution - one to which I owe my very existence, as my parents met there. I refered to this in my introduction with a 'thank you for having me' gag, and the way the audience responded completely relaxed me - I knew it was going to be fine after that, despite not knowing the bits Laura normally does as well as my own sections, and having added new bits and a re-structure for this presentation. I've never spoken to that many people at once before, and I've certainly never used a screen that big - it was literally about the size of my house!

Although I don't really get nervous when I present, I do worry about the technical side of things - I need to know, in advance, that everything is working, or I get stressed. I was really glad I asked that we check everything was okay before the conference began, because both times that Alex removed his laptop so we could hook up the 'general' one most of the rest of us were using, it didn't like the Projector and took ages to display on the big screen. Thankfully there was a break before my talk during which we could iron this stuff out.

Having got up at 4:45am I was worried I'd be tired, but adrenalin and the four-shot coffee I'd had at the station earlier carried me through. It was great to do this presentation to a crowd that was really mixed in terms of age, seniority and so on, and who weren't all familiar with what I was talking about - sometimes I fear Laura and I preach to the converted ABOUT preaching to the converted. The talk went well, I remembered everything I wanted to say (I think) and it really was far better not using notes than the New Professionals Information Days where I did use notes. People did a fantastic job of tweeting the presentation - you can read the twapperkeeper archive here - and really got the points across well, which is good as I didn't have time to amplify this event myself by setting up any auto-tweets.

People were really kind in what they said to me afterwards, and there was lots of positive feedback. It was particularly good to hear a lot of people say they found the presentation fresh and engaging even though they'd read about it all on this blog, on twitter etc, in the past. Because I really believe in the echo chamber idea and its importance, I was really pleased that many of the afternoon sessions referred back to it - I think the concept stuck. As ever, if you're interested in reading more about echolib, there is a Netvibes page with all sorts of information in one place.

The updated Prezi used on the day is below - this is restructured and improved from previous efforts, so check it out even if you're familiar with the subject matter (and of course feel free to embed it on your own site):

Escaping the echo-chamber on Prezi

There was break-out sessions after this - I chose to go to one which contained a useful talk by Tim Padfield on copyright in Special Collections, very relevant to my current work with the LIFE-SHARE Project. At lunch time I talked to the Graduate Trainees who seem to be really switched on and forward thinking about the library profession - and also went outside to look at a tree my Dad fell out of when he was a choir-boy in Cambridge...

After lunch there was about a million mini-presentations around the theme of working together in Cambridge (by and large, the more senior the presenter, the less likely they were to run to time...). I particularly enjoyed Katie Birkwood (@Girlinthe)'s talk about Open Libraries in which she made excellent use of Prezi (and an exclamation point therein, in particular) and talked very entertainingly; and the Graduate Trainees' presentation; and the summary of the TeachMeet movement which began via a speculative tweet or blog post fuelled by wine. (The movement did, not the summary.) There was excellent use of theatre in a very good talk about the Fresher's Fair (and the funniest use of the phrase 'unexplained chasm' I'd ever heard) from the twinkly-eyed and very laid-back Huw Jones. I also very much enjoyed Andy Priestner's look back at Cam23, and some random aerobics (with kissing noises) he made us do in the middle of the session!

There was a theme running through a lot of these sessions - or rather two related themes. Firstly, many of these projects and movements came about because someone just decided to 'do it' - I've talked before about how much I think we all can just achieve things ourselves now, often via the web2 tools available to us, rather than waiting for someone more senior, more influential, or cleverer to do it for us. People just tried to make things happen, and they did, and the things that resulted were a success, and will be repeated. Which brings us to the second theme, which is of the trouble with formalisation. A lot of these projects were and are informally run - there aren't people taking minutes, or even necessarily people having meetings. People just communicate via modern channels, show up on the day and get things done. This malleable model really seems to achieve a lot - it allows people the freedom to act quickly and creatively (and is in stark contrast to the bureaucracy CILIP often gets bogged down in, for example, and it is by no means just CILIP who suffers from this). Voices for the Library seems to be the ultimate exponent of this modern approach, but it's happening all over the place. The problem is, it often becomes quite hard to keep informal when things start working really well. Up-scaling and informality do not often go hand-in-hand. Particularly when money becomes involved, the accountability that results often hampers the very creative endeavour which the funds are rewarding. It's an interesting problem, and not one for which I have a ready solution.

It did put me in mind of Bethan Ruddock's outstanding presentation at ILI2010, though. In her talk, entitled Do Libraries Have a Future? - you can see a transcript of it on her blog - Bethan says this about a LinkedIn discussion on the fragmentation of the library profession:

"I found ‘supergroups’ notion intriguing – the idea of self-selecting groups that can constitute themselves according to what they want to accomplish. What I found surprising, however, was the fact that no-one in the discussion explicitly acknowledged that this is already happening. It’s happening right there in the discussion, as disparate professionals are coming together to discuss problems and issues that are common to all.

I’m fortunate to be involved with another couple of these self-selecting, self-forming groups. The first is LISNPN – the LIS new professionals’ network. Set up by Ned Potter, this is a virtual space where hundreds of new – and not-so-new! – information professionals are gathering to talk, to collaborate, to share ideas and experiences. The network is independent – it’s not affiliated with any of the prof organisations, it’s run by new professionals, for new professionals. It’s not sector-specific, it’s not country-specific. Most of the users are from the UK, but on one random page of users I also saw members from the US, Canada, Germany, Serbia, the Netherlands, Finland and Nigeria, highlighting the truly international nature of some of the issues facing information professionals.

LISNPN has recently graduated from a purely virtual network to involving some face-to-face events. Theses have been social events so far, organised by members. There’s been no approval to get, no committee to go through, no worries over the target audience – just an idea of ‘wouldn’t it be nice to meet-up for a drink and a chat? Let’s do it! Everyone welcome!’.

Does this sound like a profession that’s fragmenting? To me it sounds like a profession that is embracing its differences, and finding its commonalities."

I love the message of hope in this! And I think it is relevant to the formalisation debate, too. Perhaps the answer is that we need both informal and formal groups, as both serve their purposes and allow their opposite to function more successfully, too.

Anyway, it was a great day. It was great fun to meet so many people I'd had online interaction with previously, in the flesh. Thank you so much to Andy Priestner, who lobbied the organising committee to have two New Professionals no one had heard of to do a plenary session at a big event; I'm really sorry Laura couldn't be there, but I had a great time. My only regret is that Andy's spectacular Star Wars related Echo Chamber incident (this post went viral) happened too late to be included in the presentation - I think it's my favourite echolib escape EVER. :)

There are some more blog posts about the day, from Annie Johnson, from Katie Birkwood, from Libby Tilley, and from Sarah Stamford - let me know if I've missed any.

- thewikiman

*Okay, no one is calling it that. Just me.