1 Everyone thinks it’s all or nothing. What about just offering presenters a discount for presenting, like 10% or 20%? If free registration is a problem, slightly less registration money should be less of a problem.

2 We seem to have entirely too many presenters for the number of attendees. Perhaps having upwards of a quarter or a third of the people at a conference presenting at it is too much. Certainly it’s great to have everyone contribute who wants to but perhaps we could “weed the collection” a bit? And very often this is not a problem of having too many sessions but too many presenters per session. Perhaps we reduce the registration fee for only the main presenter or per presentation.

Keeping everything else equal, the non-presenter’s reg fee will only increase by a fraction of the presenter’s fee decrease, that fraction being the number of presenters out of non-presenters. There shouldn’t be any conference that can’t do a least some combination and level of these options.

P.S. Re: Lori’s comment above. This is off-topic but “anyone who works in a library is a librarian”? Even the janitor? *shudder*

It’s so different in other fields. I agree with you that librarians need to stand up for themselves. Stephen Abraham gave a good point today in his Casual Conversation on OPAL. Would you want to have your taxes done by someone whose name you don’t know? Would you take medical advice from a doctor whose name you did not know? Why is the information we provide different?

As a profession we need to think about the image we present not only to our peers but to other professions. I’m afraid to say that the general population does not view librarians as techno-savvy info-mavens. Nope we’re just people who check in and out books and read a lot.

We need a huge PR campaign about what libraries and library staff are all about.

I HOPE that kind of thing doesn’t happen in LibraryLand, but I’m sure it does rarely.

The biggest issue to me, though is the need to get young librarians who can’t afford much of anything (and this is true for some of us oldtimers, too!) the chance to speak.

I can understand being loathe to tell someone to pass up a so-called “important career opportunity,” even putting aside my doubts that conference speaking constitutes such an opportunity. And of course, he has to do what’s right for him and weigh the potential benefits and drawbacks.

But I think that accepting those particular terms instills in this new librarian the notion that our culture is one of accepting inadequate compensation for work. Do you really not think we devalue ourselves as a profession? Remember how surprised you were when I first talked to you about being compensated for speaking? Because not being compensated is the prevailing culture. And pardon me for saying so, but that stinks. If that’s greedy, then so be it.

As you say, one person refusing to speak won’t change the paradigm. You or I refusing to speak under those terms is meaningless, if there’s a gaggle of people ready and willing to provide their content for free. If we’re really going to effect change, then we have to educate the new speakers, before they drink the kool-aid of altruistic labor.

Cliff’s wiki is a good start for us to establish and propogate greater expectations as speakers, but I think it’s even more effective for influential people such as yourself to be talking about this stuff openly. So kudos to you for doing so.

And all that said, there are circumstances in which I, like you, will speak without compensation, but I don’t think I’ll ever be paying to get in the door just for the privilege.