Thing 15 - Attending, presenting at and organising seminars, conferences and other events

What?  Present at a conference? Me?
Or at least my reaction was something like that!  Basically, I don't feel I'm anywhere near being able to do such a thing.  Whilst I'm not about to speak at a conference, I do still run training sessions at work and the presentation tips are as useful for that.  I can definitely relate to Katie's advice about learning to embed fonts in a presentation since I've learnt the hard way that there's no point in making a presentation look nice only to find it doesn't load the same on the computer you are presenting on!

I have attended relatively few work-related events in my years in this job, mainly down to a lack of motivation, confidence, funding and/or anyone at work who would understand why I'd want to.  However, when I have attended I have felt it was worthwhile.  The only advice I can give to those in a similar situation is that coming out of a professional event having met even one person who agreed with one thing you said can give you such a boost!

As for organising events - I hate even ordering lunch for meetings we host!, although I hope that as I start to make new contacts within the library world I might one day get to the point of helping organise some sort of informal meet!