And a bit more about Borås…
Thanks to Graham for his first impressions of IFLA! My activities this year started earlier, as I was the organiser of one of the satellite events and spent three days in Borås, so I got to know the place pretty well! I can confirm that it was a really pleasant little town, as Graham indicated.
The satellite meeting was a collaborative forum on library and information science education and research, involving the IFLA Section for Education and Training (SET) [I am on the Executive of this section], the IFLA Section for Library Theory and Research (LTR), the American Association of Library and Information Science Educators (ALISE) and the European Association of Library Educators (EUCLID). The program focused on cooperation and collaboration in education and research, attracting 70 educators from across the world, with a rich program of papers which highlighted the amazing amount of collaboration happening internationally, nationally and regionally.
Australia was well represented, with Helen Partridge discussing the current national research project into the future of library education in Australia (visit http://www.liseducation.org.au/ for more information on this significant initiative that involves all the universities with LIS programs), Philip Hider from Charles Sturt University (CSU) provided insights into the program offered by CSU, and Ann Ritchie (editor of ALJ) and I presented a joint paper on the collaborative project that ALIA Health Libraries Australia (HLA) are undertaking to determine the workforce and education/training needs of the health library sector. This work will also be featured at the ALIA Access 2010 conference. Delgates learnt about the new directions in international librarianship and emerging developments in a number of European, Asian, African and North American countries. The forum resulted in the stimulus for further collaboration between the three organisations - IFLA, ALISE and EUCLID. We are working with Emerald on publishing the full papers, so that they are all readily available to everyone, as Emerald and IFLA work on new plans for open access (the theme of the IFLA conference).
The satellite meeting was hosted by the Library School at the University of Borås - this is the only library school in Sweden, so plays a very important role in our field. The conference dinner was hosted by the City of Borås - a fun evening with the delgates getting to meet many of our local colleagues in the library profession. On the second day, the IFLA New Professionals Special Interest Group (NPSIG) ran their satellite event, also at the Library School, so it was great to share a networking session at the close, before everyone moved on to Gothenburg for the ‘main event’.
For me, so far, the main focus of the IFLA conference has been meetings - lots of them! There have been meetings and strategic planning sessions with the IFLA Section for Education and Training, and I am also working with IFLA on a new intiative - the Building Stronger Library Associations (BSLA) program (http://www.ifla.org/en/bsla). A familiar face, Fiona Bradley, is the project leader for the BSLA program, which incorporates five training modules which will help support library associations in areas such as organisational development, planning, volunteer management, fundraising and building partnerships. Six countries have been selected for the first roll out of the program: Cameroon, Lebanon, Peru, Ukraine, Lithuania and Botswana, funded by IFLA in conjunction with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Global Libraries project. I am about to go into a meeting where the selected trainers will test the online version of the training program.
So - it’s all very interesting here in Sweden - and more reports and impressions will follow soon!
Gill Hallam, ALIA Director