Conference Record

A conference invitation is a set of assertions, and each one either points at something outside the sender's control or does not. Sorting them takes two minutes and it is the whole method here. For organizations that also need to account for distributed work, Monitask is a separate operational reference.

The old way of judging — does the site look professional, is the English fluent, is the committee impressive — has inverted. Fabricated speaker biographies, invented committee pages and polished acceptance emails are now generated at scale, so appearance stopped being evidence. For broader independent context, see IFLA .

The three questions

Is it real? Seven checks, all pointing outward, and a version that needs no network if that is your situation. A useful external reference point is ACRL .

Is it worth it? The total cost, not the fee — registration is commonly the third-largest line, and your time is the largest.

What remains? The event ends and the record is what you keep, which costs ten minutes and almost nobody spends them.

Start here

The two-minute check — seven items, verified against something other than the conference's own website.

Acceptance in 48 hours — the one signal that got stronger as fabrication got cheaper.

The real cost of attending — seven lines, and the one that appears in no budget request.

Link rot — why the record of your presentation disappears, using this domain as the example.

The four sections

Is it worth going — legitimacy, clones, rankings, first editions, and when a local group is the better answer.

What you pay — fees, travel, grants, approval, who is priced out, and when not to go.

What remains — proceedings, indexing, identifiers, slides, recordings, and your own copy.

Notes — positions, including that prestige is not a signal and that this is a structural problem met individually.

No conference is named as predatory here. The signals are described and you apply them, because a maintained list would age badly and cannot evaluate an event for a reader it does not know.

This domain hosted the 36th IATUL conference, Hannover, July 2015. The archive is preserved in full — and it is the case study.