6 Reasons Why Your Law Library Staff Need to Attend the Annual Professional Conference
In light of the upcoming law library conference season (notably including the Canadian Association of Law Libraries conference–CALL 2011–next week), I am taking the liberty of sharing a few reasons why I see conferences as essential to law library staff.
If you have a law library, sending at least one library staff member to a professional conference each year is worth more than the equivalent dollar cost of books.
Let me repeat that in another way: you will get more value from conferences than books.
Radical, I know, and my legal publishing friends are perhaps going to hate me for saying this. Please allow me to explain.
6 reasons why in-person conference attendance is essential for your law library staff:
- Building a network – A big strength of law library technicians and librarians is their professional network. In times when you do not have certain resources on hand, or the know-how for a particular task, the library staff member’s network is an essential resource. Think about how many times your organization, after cutting back on a resource, looks to just borrow it in. This is largely impossible unless your library staff member has already built a relationship with the lender. This is sometimes enabled by membership in an association, but if you are looking for something at 4:30 on a Friday afternoon, only those who care about the borrower are going to help out in a pinch. And by far the best way to build and develop that network and those relationships is in person. A conference facilitates this networking.
- Access to the legal publishing industry – It is the one time of year library staff have direct access to the publishing industry’s senior management. And they are all in one place. Particularly at the CALL conference, presidents of the Canadian legal publishing companies are typically present because this is a key target market. As such, library staff get the first look at new developments, often launched at the conference. It is also an essential time for building positive relationships with the publishing representatives and having your needs heard.
- Developing new or existing skills – by participating on committees, speaking at the conference, or helping to run aspects of the organization such as by sitting on the executive board of an association or being a conference planner, participants learn new skills and develop existing ones. I certainly improved my management skills over time by working on CALL conference planning committees and sitting on the Board. Knowing how to present ideas in front of a group is also an increasingly important skill. One can, of course, participate in committees from a distance, but the real work of committees and special interest groups often takes place at an association’s annual conference.
- Transfer of tacit knowledge from colleagues – the knowledge that can be written down and passed along through an article or blog post is called “explicit knowledge”. Knowledge stuck inside someone’s head, passed along best by doing something alongside someone else or comparing notes, is called “tacit knowledge”. It is much easier to gain this tacit knowledge by being there in person. A lot of learning takes place at conference lunches and social events, when law librarians and technicians seek each other out for advice. Unless you have a very large library staff or they already have a large network, they could be working in a vacuum without getting a “leg up” from the learnings of others.
- Learning the latest trends and techniques – in addition to hearing what is new from the legal publishers, and learning new thinking informally from colleagues, the professional development program at a conference is specifically designed for more formal learning about what is new, how people are handling specific challenges, and where the industry is heading. It would be great if these programs were livestreamed and recorded for posting to the web. Some are. But we are still a long way from having access to all this content on demand via the web. It will get there, but in the meantime attending in person is really the way to go.
- Meeting future staff members – the best way to hire a valuable new employee is to already be familiar with the person and perhaps even have already worked with him or her. Meeting new faces at conferences, working with them on committees are ways to establish a working relationship and sense of teamwork before you have even hired the person in question.
So often decisions about whether library staff should attend a conference is based solely on the program. But as you can see, the program as just one element in benefits from attending a conference.
I get tired of hearing that conference attendance is a “perk”. It is absolutely not. When I have attended the CALL conference through the years, it is always an intense few days, seeing me connecting, sharing and learning from 7:30 am often until midnight. There is little down time for leisure activity as we try to pack as much as humanly possible in a few short days.
Today as a consultant, I invest twice as much now in conference attendance as I did in my role as a library manager: I not only pay for my attendance, but also I give up time on client projects (and therefore income) to attend. And still I see it as essential. It is too bad there cannot be a CALL conference in everyone’s home city every year. But, the reality is that for learning opportunities specifically suited to law library staff, one must typically travel to attend the key conferences, be it CALL or one of the others: American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), Special Libraries Association (SLA), Internet Librarian, Computers in Libraries, KMWorld, or any of at least a dozen others.
If you do not have library staff attending at least one conference each year, think to yourself: will your organization fall behind? Don’t you want to give your staff as much advantage as possible to excel?
A couple salient points I neglected to include:
– a lot of what is being discussed these days at these conferences is ways to keep budgets down and work more effectively/efficiently.
– registration costs for law library conferences tend to be a lot less expensive than conferences for lawyers
Overall, cutting back on conference attendance for library staff as a cost saving measure is a false economy. You could be saving a few dollars in the short run, but missing out on opportunities to save into the future that far outweigh the cost of conference attendance.
I completely agree. I also wrote yesterday on the value of attending conferences for the Law Library of Congress blog (http://blogs.loc.gov/law/2011/05/what-do-you-call-a-gathering-of-librarians/). Thank you so much for addressing this important topic!
“the best way to hire a valuable new employee is to already be familiar with the person and perhaps even have already worked with him or her.” Really? So its about who you know? I don’t want to be cynical but the quote does provoke cynicism (or is it realism).
Anyway, does CALL invite the managing partners/lawyers to attend the conference and to walk in the shoes of their librarians? Or does convincing their employers of their value reside solely on the shoulders of the individual member? Just curious.
Great post Connie. I look forward to introducing you to the whole Field Law library team. We will all be in Calgary next week. My firm’s libraries will not be staffed as we take advantage of geography to attend a national conference in our backyard. Clearly, my firm sees value in professional development for librarians.
I think that marketing the importance of professional development for librarians and library staff is the job of librarians and library staff. Verna makes a good point that one method might be inviting our stakeholders to attend our conferences.
Another method is to invite (our) leaders to speak at our conferences. This year’s CALL conference speaker list includes a law school dean, a law firm partner, and plenty of C and D level folk. One of my firm’s partners presented a session at a CALL Conference some years ago and commented very positively on the program content.
Thank you for all the great comments, everyone.
Verna, thank you for calling me on that point re: hiring. I was originally going to write it from the point of view of someone job hunting, that being seen at a conference and working on a committee is a great way to build recognition and a reputation with future employers. But I had to turn this around from the employers’ point of view.
Allow me to reframe this idea: as an employer, if I have two equally excellent applicants and need to pick one, and I (or a fellow staff member) have worked successfully with one of the two, I would be more inclined to go with the known quantity. I’m not saying that just because I know someone I am going to hire that person; it is being familiar with what that person knows, the potential, and the personality fit. Similarly, I could have worked on a committee with someone and know for future to stay away from hiring that person.
So, it is not just who you know but also what you know. Yes, that is realism, and yes that potential is there for anyone to develop. It’s not some elitist conspiracy to hire friends.There is a saying amongst the social media specialist crowd that for your next job you will not apply with a resume, you will just be hired. And that is because of the reputation you build in advance through hard work and raising your own visibility.
That is a great question about inviting managing partners/lawyers to attend the conferences. Aside from inviting individuals as speakers as Shaunna has mentioned, I’m not aware of them attending the conference. It is an interesting thought we could consider. Do remember, though, that not all law library staff are reporting to lawyers. Some work in academic settings, government or law societies (and others). It might be an idea to actively invite local senior administrators to attend.
I know for the Association of Independent Information Professionals (another association I belong to), the annual conference is advertised to local business owners as way for them to discover what information professionals can do for them.
It might even be a good idea to have a session specifically geared to this audience dealing with issues of specific interest to them. You now have me thinking about what those sessions might cover! Thoughts?
Connie, Thanks for the above explanation re hiring. I’d found the original quote somewhat awkwardly worded and thought some explanation or rewording necessary.
Thanks also for your comments to my question. The conference would be a great venue to showcase the value and role of librarians/info profs to employers and prospective employers alike and to create better understanding between parties in the future.
All the best,
Verna