ALIA West

October 2003

IFLA Berlin 2003

The First World Library Congress

and

69th IFLA Congress and General meeting

When you sit on a plane for many hours and can't concentrate on the things you should be thinking about - or can't be bothered thinking about - and the movies are boring, what do you do? You peek out the window when everyone else is sleeping and try and guess which city you have just flown over: a vast city with twinkling lights; you marvel at the experience of flight when you pass through a bumpy bit and watch the engines and wings flex and you think: thank goodness they are flexing; and you remember the experiences you've just had! So I was in good shape to write this report when I returned to Perth at midnight August 10th.

But then, I went to work. Semester had started almost the day I left for Berlin (29 July) and so I was coming back to a very busy time. I do remember unpacking the masses of material I collected and bringing it to work. This mainly comprised EU publications on the digital environment (EU stuff is always useful for teaching) and the vast paperwork associated with running the IFLA Library Theory and Research Section (LTR), AND I put my five rolls of film (Five! my family said - do you ever stop?) into the processing shop. And after that it all too soon became a blur.

I knew there was a reason I took so many photos. Day 1 for Kerry was arriving at the Berlin Mark Hotel at 10am July 30th after I can't remember how many hours in planes and airports, feeling quite perky and phoning up a young Perth friend to let her know I'd arrived and that the remainder of the day was the only one I had free. Great! she said, I'll be around in an hour and you can come on a walking tour of Berlin with me and two Ozzie girlfriends. Which we did. That's me hugging the Oz Berlinner Bear, a contribution to masses of cuddly painted bears which formed part of one of the many cultural activities in Berlin at the time. And that's the Brandenberg Gate and also the glass dome in the Reichstag.

The next day it was off in the train to Potsdam. My Perth friend has shown me the ropes of getting train tickets when all of the signage was in German. So I stood at the station looking at two ladies who looked like "one of us" but I wasn't sure and just as the train was about to pull in, I hear Ian Johnston from Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, who introduced me to John Feather and another colleague from Loughborough. It turned out I knew more about the train than they! Off we went to the Euclid/ALISE Library Educators meeting held at Fachhochschule (FHP) Potsdam - a 20 minute regional train ride from Berlin. Ian Johnston is the Scot in the shirtsleeves, John Feather is on his right.

We had a brief walking tour of Potsdam during lunch one day of this two-day meeting and this picture shows the East German architecture of the building where our meeting was held. It is in front of the beautiful church built by Frederick Wilhelm II which is now being restored after the WW2 bombing. This is much of what Berlin is all about and a significant memorial of WW2 is the "bombed church", the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Geduchtnis-Kirche (below left), my landmark near Zoo station near where I was staying. Berlinners love their flowers and plants. Stalls like this brightened up many a walk. I only wished I could have bought some!

The IFLA conference (yes, there was one) was held in a conference centre a little out of town - more train rides. But I was an expert now, catching the U2 here, the U7 there, and even advising colleagues on the best ways to travel! We also took the bus from time to time. The weather, you might recall, was hot for Berlin and the temperature got to around 32 degrees C on some days. It was quite muggy and all we used to hear at the conference was: well you Ozzies are used to this. But there was no sea breeze!

IFLA officers have a special function on the first evening of the conference and this time it was a boat trip. The best place to be was on the top deck: the views were lovely. Other social highlights of the conference were the reception given at the Australian Ambassador's home in Berlin. Here is the Ambassador with IFLA president elect 2005-7, Alex Byrne. The last conference function was a dinner held at the newer Stasbibliotech in Berlin, an impressive building which easily catered for the some 2000 delegates who attended the function.

Our first LTR session was on Is your library project evidence-based and we had a packed house with standing room only! The papers were varied and some controversial, such that two of the speakers (Tord Hoivik from Norway and Alan Smith from NZ) kept the audience engaged during question time. The session was ably chaired by Dr Ragnar Audunsen from Norway. LTR played a role in two other IFLA sessions: one with the Management of Library Associations section on Politics and libraries with results so far of the LTR Section research project on The political perceptions of the public library. The other session was an offsite workshop on The Ethics of Librarianship. This session was based on a collection of papers brought together in a book edited by Norwegian Robert Vaagan.

Of course, LTR is but one of the many IFLA sections that hold sessions at the conference. A browse of the conference website will show you the choice you have when you attend a large conference like this. Attendance at the Berlin gathering exceeded Glasgow in 2002 by 3 delegates, with over 4500 delegates attending both meetings.

The next conference is in Buenos Aires in August 2004 and much of the planning for sessions for this and future conferences occurred whilst we gathered in Berlin. LTR put forward another research proposal which needs to make its way through the IFLA system before we know if it has been accepted. We carry out a lot of our organising on e-mail throughout the year, though all agree that there is nothing like meeting together face-to-face to really sort things out and make final decisions.

Please consider IFLA Buenos Aires in 2004. I understand that incoming ALIA president and West Australian Imogen Garner, now the university librarian here at Curtin University, expects to attend. There are always a good number of Ozzies at the conference. The 35 we had in Berlin seems to be the number the conference attracts when it is a long way from home. However, the real fun is meeting so many other colleagues from other lands, walking around and soaking up the surrounds which the conference forces you to take in, and, if you have the inclination, joining one of the sections and getting involved. Then you have to go to the next conference, and the next, and the next...

Kerry Smith
Head, Dept Media and Information, Curtin University of Technology,
and chair/treasurer, Library Theory and Research Section, IFLA.