Seasoned LILAC attendees, aka the CILIP Information Literacy Group committee, share their top tips to get the most from the conference. So, whether you’re a newbie or have attended every one since 2004, we hope you’ll find this useful. Feel free to add your own top tips in the comments section!
- Talk to people! Everyone is really friendly and we’re all there with a shared goal so finding common ground is nice and easy.
- Try to speak to as many different people as possible.
- Talk to people outside your sector!
- Don’t go to every session – use those spare sessions to reflect on what you’ve heard, make follow up plans.
- Try to find time to reflect during the conference itself, even if it means missing a talk. You’ll find you can end up taking away more that way that cramming *everything* in.
- Go to some talks that are outside your current job role or main interests, it’s surprising how often you’ll learn useful and inspiring things that way.
- Try and identify at the end of each session at least one takeaway lesson for you – a “do” or a “do not”.
- Thinking about take aways from sessions can help if you have to write a report for colleagues on the conference or simply if you want to share some of your new knowledge with your team or perhaps more widely through twitter or a blog post.
- Whilst you are watching people speak – see if there are any tips and tricks you can learn about presenting too. This will be useful for your teaching and perhaps inspire you to put in a paper of your own next year.
- Sometimes just tag along with someone else for the ride when choosing which sessions to attend. Some of the best sessions I’ve been to at conferences are those I haven’t planned to see.
- Err and pace yourself with the late night partying and early starts unless you have booked a week off afterwards!
- Visit the IL Group stand! Members of the IL Group committee will be available on our stand at the LILAC exhibition during registration, breaks and over lunch. Please do come and say hello, find out more about the committee and the work we do, and of course pick up some goodies!
Most of all, enjoy the conference!
(This is an update of a post originally published in 2015.)