Conferences
Professional conferences require funding, time, energy to travel, drafting a proposal, and being invited to speak, so it’s good to start considering them during the planning phase. If you are able to work them into your project plan, they are excellent opportunities to enhance and promote your work. You can use conference sessions to engage attendees in your publication during community review and after publication.
If your team does not have resources to attend national or international conferences, look to regional and local opportunities. If your team is geographically dispersed, plan for several team members to attend small gatherings in their locations. Regional or local conferences are somewhat affordable with or without a budget, and they require less carbon emissions to attend.
Many conferences offer pop-up sessions, research forums, or lightning talk presentation opportunities after the Call for Proposals has closed. Look out for communities, association bodies, or vendors that are hosting programs at your intended audiences’ conferences, and reach out to them to see if there is room in their program for an overview of your work in progress. If you can’t get into something already happening, you can hold your own independent pop up session as a social event over coffee, drinks, or a meal, then promote it as an independent add-on event inspired by the conference. Many conferences allow attendees to post community-organized events in their conference application of choice. Conference activities grow the community of practice in addition to generating helpful feedback. Maybe someone will even pick up a related inquiry that was out of scope for the publication, amplifying and growing the work.
The Born-Digital Access Working Group (BDAWG) often deploys this method of socializing their work. They have a natural home at their host institution’s annual Forum, where they workshopped their publications Levels of Born-Digital Access, Born-Digital Description in Finding Aids, and others prior to publishing them. The BDAWG members who run these workshops typically come from well-resourced institutions that are invested in supporting the Digital Library Federation.
