Librarians’ Attitudes Toward Conferences: A Study

The authors surveyed librarians to determine the reasons why they do or do not attend conferences, as well as what their attitudes were toward the various conference offerings such as roundtables, poster presentations, and the like. Librarians were queried to gather a variety of demographic and professional data. The resulting data were analyzed to find significant relationships between respondents’ demographic information and their attitudes toward specific conference offerings. The two most cited reasons given for going to conferences were professional rejuvenation and networking, both benefits not directly related to conference content. In addition to quantitative results, respondents replied to open-ended questions, and these qualitative results are included as well