It looks good: two days of conferencing (May 7 and 8) on the OCLC campus in Dublin, Ohio. They have lined up John Blyberg and Joan Frye Williams to provide keynotes for what appears to be otherwise a typical, participant-structured unconference.

It seems like there is a lot of potential for this to be a great event. But one slightly odd thing caught my eye: the registration fees.

The libray camps and unconferences that I have heard about up to now have been free or low-cost to attend. LITACamp is priced more like a typical ALA event: registration is $150 for LITA members, $210 for ALA Members, and $290 for non-members.

I’m going to try and keep my normal tendency to editorialize in check here. I certainly think there is more than one way to rock an unconference, and I’m not averse to people charging fees for them. I have sympathy for what Meredith Farkas says about Value in the online world. I have wondered before if “free” can work against a person wanting to travel to an unconference: that $150-$290 seems like something of a “guarantee” that LITACamp will be “serious” and worth traveling to, though in reality, it’s hard to see how the content of the LITACamp will be affected by the cost. And while it’s nice that they offer breakfast and lunch, it looks like most of the money will go straight to LITA.

For now I’ll just say that these registration fees seem unusual for an unconference, and I’m very curious to see how people react.

Another interesting upcoming unconference is the ACRL Preconference Unconference, conceived by the folks at Radical Reference. By positioning this unconference as an ACRL preconference, they stand a chance of pulling in national participation. The regional nature of Library Camp of the West was more of a feature than a bug, as it facilitated discussions of issues that we could tackle as Colorado and Wyoming librarians. But I think it will be great to get people together from across the the country to meet in a Library Camp environment. I predict many more unconferences scheduled as official or unofficial preconferences or post-conferences to established national meetings.

The RadRef preconference also diverges from the usual subject matter of library unconferences. Most previous events have either had a technology focus, or, like Library Camp Nebraska and Library Camp of the West, have had no stated theme or focus. This one, though, will be “on social justice and alternative and radical collections and programs in academic libraries.” I hope that doesn’t limit their participation too much. It might be worth pointing out that you don’t have to be radical to attend. You might just want to think about how to serve your populations that are interested in social justice and alternative literature. On my campus, that’s a not-inconsiderable number of students.

Jenna Freedman is one of the rad people behind this pre/un-conference. She’s high on my list of librarians I would like to meet. If I were going to ACRL, you can be sure I’d arrange things so I could attend this event.

Right now, I’m working on setting this up with Laura Crossett and Joe Kraus. If you live in the area, I hope you will come, and I hope you will consider helping us un-organize this un-conference.

It’s interesting how these things happen. In the fall of 2006, in the wake of all the blog posts about Library Camp East, I had the following chat session with Laura “theblackmolly” Crossett:

We didn’t do anything about it, but it was in the back of our minds, and we’d sometimes say to each other “hey, when are we going to do that library camp?”

Then, at the end of this May, I mentioned this idea to Joe Kraus in the Library Society of the World Meebo room. Joe, not coincidentally, is a librarian at the University of Denver (DU) and part-time instructor in the Library and Information Science Program there. After two years of Laura and me dreaming about it, Joe had the date set and the rooms booked at DU in less than six weeks. Sometimes you just need to ask the right person to move things along.

So if you can come, please sign up on the wiki. If you have advice on running or attending an unconference, please share in the comments on this post.