It seems a little perverse to be thinking about what I’ll be doing after NLS2006 when the conference doesn’t happen until next week, but it’s something that a few of us on the committee have been discussing.

The first step will be to write about our experience, in the hope that the work we’ve done in coming up with templates and processes can be reused by others. A lot of things I’ve worked on will be uploaded to the LISauthor wiki.
I am also planning an article about the programme process, which will also take a look at the motivation of new librarians to publish, and their experiences of doing so. I am hoping to survey our NLS speakers, because NLS is promoted as (but not limited to) an opportunity for new writers, as well as those that write for Footnotes, Library Student Journal and so on.

One of the things I found challenging about organising a conference programme was that it was hard to find one place where I could find all the information I needed about how to do it. I found lots of advice on organising events, MICE industry journals and books, and plenty of things about the pros and cons of peer review and the changing nature of scholarly publishing. But nothing recent that really brought everything together written for the library sector.

In a ‘is this spam or is this really an offer’? co-incidence, I received a fairly general qurey letter from a publisher asking if I would be interested in writing a book for them. It has set a few wheels turning in my mind. Not for next year, but maybe within the next 10.

There’s a few things I want to learn in the coming year as well, especially Ruby on Rails for which I have a social software-type site in mind.
Beyond all that, I’m still on four other committees that will continue well into 2007, and it almost doesn’t need to be said that I’m planning more travel next year. So whatever happens, I won’t be worried about a lack of things to do!

nls2006