IFLA - the Presidential Perspective
Well I’m at my first IFLA Congress in downtown Gothenburg. Gothenburg (Yota-boy as pronounced by the locals) is Sweden’s 2nd largest city and is situated on the west coast of Sweden. As a centre its origins are based on trading and commerce due to its location as a port, the biggest in Scandanavia. IFLA is very much like the United Nations of the Library world. There are approximately 3,500 delegates from 128 different countires. While Sue was engaged in a standing committee meeting as a delegate, I attended part of the meeting as an observer. Sue has filled you in on the SC’s work so I won’t dwell on the meeting.
My early exit from the meeting was because I went on a library tour to Boras (Boros as pronounced by the locals). Boras is a city of about 100,000 people and its traditional base was trading and textile manufacturing. While the manufacturing element of the local economy has died, they have maintained a focus on textile technology, textile design and fashion. The local university where we visited specialises in textiles and design, but has also the largest and oldest library school in Sweden. Our tour was multi-faceted. It included a visit to the relatively new university library building, a tour of the many sculptures of Boras (for which Boras has a national reputation), afternoon tea at the art gallery, and finally a fascinating visit to Sweden’s only library museum.
The museum covers the history of Swedish public libraries since the 1800’s. It has books, shelves, library equipment, records, and technology covering all ages. If ever you’re in Boras I encourage you to visit the Library Museum as it is certainly an interesting place to visit. Here are a couple of photos from the museum. The piece of equipment in the first picture is fairly obvious, but can anybody tell me what the second photo is?
Here a a couple of photos from the many scultpures spread throughout Boras.
The conference commenced in earnest today Wednesday. The opening ceremony consisted of an introduction by Agneta Olsson the Coonference Chair, Presidential Address by IFLA President Ellen Tise, and the opening keynote by Jan Eliasson, UN President (2005/6). His theme was of the importance of libraries to meeting peoples thirst and access to knowledge and that this is inextricably linked to the interdependent entites of peace, development, and human rights.
The ceremony also included two musical segments. The first a hauntingly beautiful acoustic guitar accompanying a female singer with a beautiful, rich, and powerful voice. The other was your traditional Swedish folk group doing ABBA covers. They had most of the 3500 delegates up and dancing. And this was before Midday!
More Presidential observations before the conference concludes.
Graham Black, President