LILAC Stories: Exploring the long-term impact of the LILAC Conference on the Information Literacy Community

Aims and Objectives

The aim of this research is to demonstrate the value of the LILAC Conference to employers in all sectors to support future applications for attendance and participation.

“Other barriers that make it challenging to justify the costs of conference attendance are related to the measurable impact of conference attendees’ learning. It can be difficult to assess learning from conference attendance. And it can be difficult to measure the impact of conference attendance on the employee and potential beneficiaries, such as patrons, students, and researchers” (McGowan et al., 2021, p. 551).

This has indeed proved difficult; gathering data in a formal way that is ethically sourced, with participant understanding of use of this data, as opposed to anecdotal evidence, has proved extremely challenging and may demonstrate that whilst this conference (and presumably other professional events and organisations) are esteemed and valued by their communities, there is little to no motivation to engage with research surrounding them outside of individual goodwill towards the event from those members who are already heavily involved within it.