Roy Tennant wrote:

> I'm not saying we need to limit the conference
> to 80 seats or so, but I think we should at least mark the passing of
> this concept with some regret. The more C4L becomes like every other
> conference the less it is the kind of unique event it was created to
> be.


There is always a trade-off between comfortably small and exclusivity. Regional meetings will find it easier to be comfortably small, but they do tend towards not having the opportunity to meet new people. When a group finds a really successful way of sharing information within a professional community, a larger pool of people will want to participate. This is a good thing, for all it has costs.

The tricky part for the old guard to do is how do you manage preserving as much of the original vibe as you can while not putting up a wall that keeps out scary strangers. It's hard work, but not impossible. People have proposed lots of potential solutions in this conversation: say there is no problem and we like it the way it is; lottery for a single conference; different registration times for a single conference; one large and many regional conferences; shrink the current conference even further. All of them have pros and cons. As long as people are willing to talk through them and be willing to change, the conference will probably be the stronger for it.

-Deborah
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Deborah Kaplan
Digital Resources Archivist
Digital Collections and Archives
Tufts University