• http://growchangelearn.blogspot.com/2007/06/strange-persistence-of-conferences.html

Tom Haskins offers a good reason why conferences remain important even in a world of ever readier access to ever increasing information. Haskins suggests that we need experts now more than ever, not for access to information, but for evaluation and filtering. The point is one that librarians, too, are fond of making, and it ought to cheer any scholar, though it may feel to some that the rules are changing in the middle of the game. And even if Haskins is correct—as I believe he is—we still have no guarantee that the broader community will appreciate just what it is that experts can offer them. A part of the challenge for academia today ought to be to find ways to participate persuasively in new media. Of course, careers are still made or broken primarily in print, and surely that is another reason why conferences persist; they continue, among other things, to bring scholars and print publishers under one roof.