ALIA West

October 2002

Och lassies and laddies

A report on IFLA Glasgow 2002

Glasgow needed the IFLA 2002 conference, perhaps even more so when the decision was made some years ago to hold it there. It is a city rebuilding itself and its image and it has a wonderful architectural and artistic history behind it. As most of you know, Glasgow was the home of shipbuilding in the UK until the Koreans and others undercut it in the 1970s. The city then went through very tough times and even now there are signs that full recovery has not been made. It is located on the Clyde River which looks quite clean in this picture. The crane is a monument to the bygone era.

The city welcomed the 4 700 delegates to IFLA from 16-24 August. The conference also celebrated the 75th birthday of IFLA and launched "the IFLA hymn" a lovely piece of music composed by IFLA staffer Sophie Fefoldi and her fellow musician brother.

The number of Australian registrants climbs each year with 45 registered for IFLA Glasgow. Jennefer Nicholson, executive director of ALIA and Ann Ritchie (now in the Northern Territory) were two of the Oz contingent. ALIA president Joyce Kirk and past president Alan Bundy were also present. Those I met felt quite an affinity with the city and we put that down to some of the architecture which reminded us of colonial Australia, especially Sydney and Melbourne, and the Glaswegians - or perhaps it was the Scots - and their friendly nature and sense of humour which we found similar to ours. This helped to make the conference a truly successful event for me.

The conference venue worked well and the main lecture hall in the "Armadillo" was impressive. The logistics of getting there for those of us who stayed in town was made easier with a free pass on the underground for the duration of the conference. However, the "lower level train" track had been flooded during recent rains (which later moved across to completely flood out parts of Europe) and so for the first few days we were bussed from Glasgow Railway Station. I loved the station so much I took a few pictures and couldn't wait till the trains were running again.

My week started early with a series of business meetings where I represented the Library Theory and Research (LTR) Section (http://www.ifla.org/VII/s24/sltr.htm). LTR encourages international collaboration in research projects and I later describe our current endeavour with Professor Bob Usherwood of public library fame. Australian colleague Alex Byrne is even higher up the IFLA tree and has more meetings as he attends the Governing Board as the chair of the FAIFE core activity (http://www.ifla.org/faife/index.htm).

LTR's contribution to the conference was shared sponsorship of the Northumbria Lite workshop on performance measurement in libraries on Thursday 22 August and our workshop for our international project on the political perceptions of the public library. Here you can see project leader Professor Bob Usherwood holding forth.

I also took in sessions on knowledge management, copyright, government information policy, education, licensing agreements and library buildings. In true IFLA style there were too many choices in papers and you can check out the program at: http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla68/index.htm. As you know, good papers at conferences are a hit and miss affair, though I was lucky because all of the sessions I attended had some good and thoughtful contributions. IFLA is a great conference to catch up on international developments in things like licensing, meta data, Dublin Core, and more generally on many of our core interest areas like information retrieval, information policy, cpd, library education, and the list goes on.

The exhibition was extensive and included a "model children's library". There were opportunities to visit libraries around town and I caught up with the lovely facility in the GOMA - Gallery of Modern Art, as well as the Glasgow public library, the Mitchell Library, and the Hillhead public library near the Botanic Gardens. Nor could I resist a visit to Borders bookstore complete with Starbucks cafe.

The registration includes at least two large receptions where the food and drink is plentiful because these are usually sponsored events. The first at the Museum of Science, near the conference venue, was sponsored by the Glasgow City Council, and the second I attended was held in the Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. We had two other cultural delights: a music concert at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall and the Edinburgh Tattoo at Edinburgh castle. The conference committee had reserved 1500 seats at the tattoo and arranged buses throughout the day to get us there. It was a marvellous experience and much better being there than watching it on TV. The rain started just before the concert and we thought we were doomed to seeing the event performed by bands in raincoats. But the rain stopped. Edinburgh is a wonderful city too.

IFLA 2003 is in Berlin. IFLA plans its conferences some time in advance and if you check the IFLA website (http://www.ifla.org/IV/index.htm) you can see what is in store in years to come.

Kerry Smith, SMI, Curtin University