Keeping track of conferences and events for Information Professionals

I've been tallying up the number of CPD hours I've accumulated over the last year, and was surprised to learn that I'm approaching 100 hours worth of attendance at conferences, training events, and webinars! Crazy eh? I had no idea that there were so many different training opportunities in my sector. The funny thing is, I'm sure that not many other people are aware of exactly how much is available to them in terms of conferences and events for Information Professionals. There's no one place were these events are listed. You have to keep an eye out on Twitter and various LIS email lists to catch them.

A little while ago I decided that the small list of events that I had saved in Evernote could be better managed. I decided to import the information to Silk. I came across Silk in a round about way. It's no secret that I'm a big fan of the Ig Nobel Prizes; awards that "honour achievements that make people LAUGH, and then THINK." I often use the winning papers as examples for referencing workshops. While browsing the information on the Improbable Research website, I came across a beautiful representation of all the data on previous Ig Nobel winners using Silk. This is awesome, I thought. I can use this! And that was how I began to dip my toes into the fascinating world of data visualisation.

After creating the Conferences and Events Silk (which was super easy by the way) I thought it would be worth updating with information on conferences and events that I probably wasn't planning to attend, but that would still be of interest to someone working as an Information Professional. Today my page tracks nearly 50 different conferences and events across the UK, with a few from Europe thrown in for good measure. As far as I know, it is the most comprehensive list of library and information-related events on the web at the moment.

To what end? Well, I'm hoping the information will be useful to other LIS folks in the UK. I'm also hoping that after a year or two collecting and updating data I will be able to plot trends in event types. For example, already I can say that events usually fall into one of two categories; they're either very cheap (or free), or obscenely expensive. Very few events are priced in between. What does this say about our industry I wonder? Another trend in the data, which should come as no surprise to anybody, is the bias towards hosting events in London. I knew there were a lot more opportunities in London, but I had no idea how many - over half of the LIS-related conferences and events in the UK take place there!

To summarise, creating and maintaining the list of events has been a positive step in my own continuing professional development. Both as a source of opportunities, and as a means to understand the different groups of Information Professionals in the UK and their training needs. Hope you find it useful too!