For those of you interested in how summits work, the obvious source of information is my Frontline column in last July’s Incite. I wrote about the Education and Workforce Summit which we held in March 2008. For that summit about 60 people, almost all from libraries, assembled at the State Library of Victoria.
The Public Libraries Summit is like that summit in one way - not everyone can go. All summits are selective by their nature.
The Public Libraries Summit is also different because it is definitely NOT about librarians talking to each other. As Jan Richards put it in yesterday’s blog post, this summit is planned as “the seed of an ongoing conversation with the Federal Government and other partners.” This is not a summit to get our own act together, it is a summit for building bridges with government.
This is a very good time to talk to governments, Commonwealth, state and local. Because there has been a change of at the top, there is a stronger possibility of new thinking and new agendas. The summit is to put public libraries on the agenda of government, Commonwealth, state and local.
You can help. We need everyone’s ideas. You can put your ideas by writing submissions and proposals. There is information on how to do this here. As I suggested, this is a time for new thinking and new ideas, and above all for communicating them to governments. Soon, please - the deadline is 27 February.
Derek Whitehead, ALIA President