Friday 7 October 2011

Thing 15 - Events - attending, speaking, & organising

I've had some experience of public speaking mostly at university or in my previous role as a TEFL teacher (I think teaching is the most terrifying form of public speaking - standing up in a classroom full of teenagers, most of whom would rather be off doing something else especially in summer school!). Mostly though I've made presentations to other students either as part of assessed coursework projects or as part of student projects like Student Mentoring. For instance, while studying in America I had to summarise & present a series of ACLU law reviews to our American Civil Liberties class on a regular basis. I've also given assessed presentations on topics ranging from 'Native American schooling in the C18th & its cultural effect' to 'Thematic analysis in LIS research methods'. The discussion caused be the latter presentation was particularly helpful when it came time to create the research methods for my dissertation & arrange research events, including focus groups & market research surveys. Despite these scary, but ultimate good, experiences of speaking at & organising events I haven't had a lot of experience of actual 'professional' public speaking apart from a few talks given at forums such as the Oxford TeachMeet or the LGBT in Libraries launch which went off yesterday without a hitch, & with lots of interest. I have been involved in arranging various group visits at our library & talking to them about our collections & services but I am trying to gain more experience of arranging or speaking at professional events, in order to continue to expand my skills in advocacy & professional networking. As part of this I have been applying to attend various conferences & other events through bursary/grant applications, which not only give the opportunity to attend the conference but usually offer the opportunity to have an article published or give a talk about your conference experience. For instance, I applied for the recent CILIP Aspire Award as well as the last 2 SLA-ECCA conference awards, but so far I haven't had much luck. I am putting together a list of conferences, such as next year's Umbrella conference, & various workshops to investigate ways of finding support to attend them or saving up for them. I'm particularly interested in these areas:
Trade Literature
Marketing
Web Writing
Digitisation projects
Advocacy
National Policy
Diversity, Disability & LGBT
If anyone hears of any events in these areas please let me know so that I can investigate the possibility of attending.

One of the main issues I have found relating to attending events as a Swindonian or even setting them up is the affect of geography (we don't quite fall into any of the geographical categories of West, East, South or Central). Most professional events that are already in place are either in London or Bristol, or even further afield, & you have to factor in at least a couple of hours travel time. When it comes to setting up our own events the issue is finding like minded people, who are willing to travel all the way to Swindon. For instance, we launched our LGBT in Libraries project yesterday & in the run up we were trying to circulate information & invites to as wide a community group as possible - particularly as opportunities for networking with the LGBT Community in Swindon are slim, there is one club & one pub & that is about it, just one of the many reasons we've been trying to get groups like LGBT in Libraries off the ground. As part of the marketing we tried making contact with 'local'-ish community groups that are already in existence & while they were all happy to pass on details to their members on the day of the launch we were pretty much limited to interest from Swindon librarians & Swindon community members. Although the wider professional/social community might support a project in principle it can be incredibly difficult to actually get them to actually physically support it by attending events outside of their own geographical community. One of the areas we're currently looking at is linking our local events into national events/campaigns, such as the Green Carnation book award, not just to raise our profile but to hopefully forge links with other community groups across the country. As a result we will be looking at the possibility of setting up a new LGBT reading group in our local libraries to make use of our brand new collection. We're also looking at other ways we can get our local council or local equality coalition involved in supporting us to provide other community groups & services but there's a long way to go before we're anywhere close to arranging anything in that area.

As well as the LGBT community group work I'm also interested in looking at setting up a professional library network in Swindon & the surrounding area. I'm not sure what format it would take, whether it would just be a regular social meeting in a cafe or pub (perhaps even getting involved in regular events - pub quizzes, film nights, or anything else in the Swindon area) or a more structured series of events where we could invite guest speakers, or some combination of the two. At the moment I'm trying to find out whether there is anyone in the area who would be interested in anything like this but I've hit a bit of a brick wall in that as there is no existing networking group or local professional newsletter for the Swindon area it is very difficult to make information available or get feedback with colleagues from other sectors. I'm trying to figure out a way of getting the information out to more people on a local level, obviously I will at some point be making contact with CILIP's newsletter as a possible way of sending out information but there's no guarantees that all librarians in Swindon are members so I would like to find a way to make contact at the local level. Any advice at all on how to set up a local group, particularly making 1st contact with people would be very gratefully received.

For my part, the main piece of advice I would give to anyone who is planning on speaking at or organising an event may seem an obvious one given the topic - you must practise COMMUNICATING, with your team leader, line manager, colleagues, stakeholders & audience & anyone else you can think of. You can write the best speech of your life but if you've fall down when it comes to communicate with your audience & marketing your event nobody will be there to hear it. It's also very important that you don't assume that just because you wrote it or organised it it is automatically brilliant & doesn't need to be changed at all there is ALWAYS room for feedback & improvement.
The other thing that is helped by practising communicating, or even just proactising your presentation in front of your colleagues & getting their feedback, is your sense of self-confidence & your belief in the project which will be a massive boost when it comes time to actually get up & start talking particularly if you're trying to get other professionals to sign up to your project.

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