ALIA Board Blog

By now most of you will have learned of the decision by the IFLA Governing Board to change the location of IFLA2010 from Brisbane to Goteborg in Sweden. As you can imagine this was a difficult decision which was not taken lightly.  It has come about because world economic circumstances have changed very markedly from when Australia was named as the host country back in 2007. All of us have been affected in some way by the global economic crisis and this is another of the ramifications of the world economic downturn. Because the greater number of attendees come from Europe an North America, the National Committee and the IFLA Governing Board were keenly aware that shrinking professional development budgets would likely have an impact on the Congress. So while fundraising at a local level was progressing well, the projected shortfall was determined to be an unacceptable burden to IFLA.

ALIA believes the long term continuity of the international association is paramount and therefore supports the IFLA Governing Board’s decision.  

Many of you have sent messages expressing your frustration at this direction and while we empathise with your response and share your disappointment we believe it to be the sensible, financially responsible thing to do. An IFLA Congress is an incredibly complex event with a budget of $AU6-7 million - as an outsider I didn’t realise how complex until I joined the National Committee mid way through last year.

True to the Australian spirit of “lets’ move on” the lists and emails are alive “where do we go from here?” “can we now have a biennial?” and innovative ideas for professional development and networking. As we have only lived with IFLA’s decision for less than 48 hours we still have a great deal to work through and I would urge you to be patient. The National Committee will meet again by teleconference next week to discuss future options and the ALIA Board has earmarked this as a priority item. In the interim let’s stay focused and resist the temptation to organise a plethora of unrelated events.

I would like to thank you for your support, reassuring words and understanding. Let’s turn this into a positive.

Jan Richards

ALIA President

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 9th, 2009 at 4:11 pm and is filed under IFLA 2010 Brisbane, IFLA, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.