Sure I’d Attend The ACRL Virtual Conference – If It Was Free
How many ACRL members share this sentiment? I raise this question because of a comment submitted to a previous post about the ACRL virtual conference, asking if any thought has been given to making the ACRL Virtual Conference a free event. And that’s a good point to raise. After all, there are a fair number of free web conferencing opportunities being promoted throughout the year. Why does ACRL charge a fee to attend the conference? Is this just another way that ALA tries to vacuum money out of its members’ wallets (or conference budget line)? Honestly, I have no intimate knowledge about the economics of the ACRL conference, so I don’t have a good answer to the question.
I do know that putting on a virtual conference has costs attached. The organization that provides the conferencing infrastructure has expenses, and ACRL can’t expect to use their (in this case, The Learning Times Network) resources for free during a two-day conference. We couldn’t expect to use the New Orleans Convention Center for free, could we? I’m sure there were other costs as well. Perhaps ACRL could do more to find sponsors who would support the cost of the virtual conference, allowing them to lower the registration fee. On the other hand, I think there may be some positive outcomes because ACRL does charge a fee for their Virtual Conference. Consider the following:
What if ACRL did make the virtual conference free? Would you register? I think more members certainly would. And would they show up? When any program or event is free those who registered have less of a commitment to attend, and I do believe that virtual conferences require a certain commitment factor. By commitment I mean making sure you have taken the time to test your PC before the conference to make sure it works and you are ready to log in the day of the first program. I mean investing in a microphone so you can participate more fully. I mean clearing your calendar so you’ll be free all day to log in to conference sessions. If the attitude’s going to be “maybe I’ll give this a try the day of the conference” it’s not going to work well for you, the presenter or other attendees. To my way of thinking, having a registration fee in place helps to ensure those who attend are seriously interested and have made a commitment. That’s going to make it a better conference experience all participants.
Perhaps ACRL could make some of the poster sessions and a selected presentation archive or two available for free after the conference. Not only would this be a great gesture for the members who didn’t attend, for whatever reason, but it might encourage them to do so in the future after getting a taste of virtual conferencing. I’m sure there are going to be many free virtual webcast events throughout the year, such as those offered by the Blended Librarians Online Learning Community, OPAL, Web Junction, SirsiDynix, and others. If you try them and find virtual conferencing is a form of professional development that appeals to you, give some thought to registering for a fee-based, more intensive experience like ACRL’s virtual conference. I think you would find it to be a great value for money considering how much you can learn right at your desktop. And speaking of great value, there are several presentations and poster sessions that I can choose from to use for staff development (ACRL is fine if you use your conference registration to log in and share a session with others – up to a year after the conference – but it’s not kosher to pass your conference login account to others to use as they wish). As an administrator how much might you spend sending staff to F2F conferences and workshops to get the same level of training. From that perspective the registration fee is an even better value.
Posted by StevenB on April 28th, 2006 under Just Thinking.
Comments: 7
Comments
Comment from Lisa Hinchliffe
Time: April 28, 2006, 9:13 am
I think there needs to be an additional nuance here. I think maybe “free to ACRL members” ….
I find the juxtaposition in my email for announcements for fee-based ACRL online workshops with announcements for free online sessions from ELI and others interesting on certain days. The barriers to participate in free are just plain lower. I don’t have to ask for funding or pay for it myself, there is not administrative paperwork to process my registration (as there is when the library is paying and so has to comply with various audit etc rules), and I can venture out into areas that might be of interest but not core to my job duties. Finally, if it turns out the session isn’t what I expected or (rare but happens) the speaker isn’t any good, I easily move on to other things without guilt.
Regardless, I’d really like to see when the revenues from the online conferences and workshops go to within ACRL. (Reflecting a similar discussion found time to time on many blogs about the lack of transparency about ALA finances.) We criticize other organizations for using library subscriptions to journals to support other activities that aren’t self-sustaining on membership fees. Is ACRL doing the same thing but just with fees for various services that we might think should be member benefits?
On a side but related note – I’m really pleased that my Chair’s program for the Instruction Section this year will be captured digitally and then made available on the IS website. I don’t expect fewer attendees at the session in NO because of this (though I predict fewer attendees for other reasons). Thanks to another author on this blog (ScottW) for chairing the committee and making it reality.
Comment from Steve Lawson
Time: April 29, 2006, 1:34 am
>Perhaps ACRL could make some of the poster sessions and a selected presentation archive or two available for free after the conference.
Why not put a synchronous event–keynote or discussion or the like–for free as the “kickoff” of the conference. If people attend and like it, they can instantly sign up for the rest of the conference.
Why not all the poster sessions for free *during* the conference? Poster sessions are nice, but no one pays $200 for an online conference because they want to see the poster sessions.
Give more away for free, and I bet you will get more paying customers in the long run. If the conferences are already filling up before the registration deadline (are they?) why not release most of the content for free shortly after the end of the conference? I expect people are paying for the opportunity to interact and be a part of the conference. If that is true, releasing the recordings and “posters” would have no effect on registration.
Comment from StevenB
Time: April 29, 2006, 6:42 am
Those are some good suggestions Steve. I’ll just mention a few things here. Keep in mind the poster sessions – if you haven’t seen one – are not just the kind of poster you see at a conference. They are recorded presentations so the content is quite useful. Perhaps a few could be free – but I suppose part of paying the fee is getting access to all of them. I think the idea of a free keynote session is also a good idea. I don’t know what the limit is on the number of people who can join an Elluminate session but it wouldn’t be fair to a paying customer if they couldn’t tune in because someone who didn’t pay got there first (maybe there’s a tech solution for that). As far as making everything free afterwards, I believe part of the value in paying is to get access to everything up to a year after the conference. But ACRL should monitor visits to the sites. I would be most paying customers don’t come back that often throughout the year, so at some point the programs could be made free or available at a deep discount. The archives are much more than just uploaded PPTs – which is what you get after a lot of conferences are over. But thanks for your suggestions.
Pingback from OPAChyderm » Should web “conferences” be free?
Time: April 29, 2006, 9:21 pm
[...] A post at the ACRLog explores the issues of cost and conferences — in particular, web conferences. [...]
Comment from Walt Lessun
Time: May 2, 2006, 1:56 pm
Virtual Conferences work for me (and others in one librarian libraries) because I don’t have to clear my calendar to attend. They are a prime example of “cheaper, better, faster” — and I don’t have to choose two.
Trackback from See Also
Time: May 10, 2006, 2:32 am
Towards better online conferences (part one)…
I have been thinking about online conferences lately, prompted by my recent participation in HigherEd BlogCon (HEBC) and Steven Bell’s post Sure I’d Attend The ACRL Virtual Conference – If It Was Free at ACRLog (the sentiment expressed in the……
Pingback from Information Wants To Be Free » Blog Archive » On ALA 2.0 Bootcamp and free access to online learning
Time: May 26, 2006, 7:11 pm
[...] What are the negatives of doing a conference like HigherEd BlogCon? Well, Steven Bell is right that people who attend a free conference may feel less committed to show up and participate. HigherEd BlogCon’s strengths were also its weaknesses — it was free and it was asynchronous. When people pay money, they will want to get their money’s worth. They will want to get as much out of the presentations as they can. When people only have one chance to watch, read or listen to the presentations, they will make it more of a priority. When people know that they can look at the presentations a day, week or month later for free, there isn’t that same sense of urgency. While we did get a lot of visitors to the site, we didn’t get a lot of conversation about the presentations in the comments section. I take some blame for this, because I really should have tried to stir up conversations. I had the flu the week of the Library track, so I was barely able to post the stuff, much less think analytically. Steve Lawson suggests that perhaps a threaded discussion board or live chats would have increased conversations and I agree. Perhaps we could have asked questions on a discussion board about how attendees use social software in their institutions or what they think about this or that topic. Perhaps we could have had lots of live chats with presenters (something we had actually talked about doing, but we just didn’t have time to organize it with all the other stuff we had to do to prepare for the conference). I think the biggest failing of HigherEd BlogCon was the lack of conversation, but I think we could have sparked conversations without charging money and without making the presentations themselves synchronous. The failing was on us, the organizers, for not doing more, and not on the format of the conference. We could have done better and I’m sure next year HigherEd BlogCon 2007 will be better. [...]
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