News and views

Alex Byrne to be future IFLA president

Alex Byrne, university librarian, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, has been voted president-elect by IFLA members.

He will begin his two-year term as president-elect during the IFLA conference in Berlin this August and will succeed Kay Raseroka as IFLA president in August 2005 for a two-year term.

Alex is the current chair of the IFLA Free Access to Information and Freedom of Expression (FAIFE) Committee.

On hearing the news, Alex said:

'I am honoured and humbled to be elected President-elect of IFLA, the peak international organisation for my profession. I look forward to working closely with President Kay Raseroka and then succeeding her to continue the process of making IFLA a truly global organisation which has the right to know at its heart. Through the combined efforts of our profession, IFLA can support our aspirations, and those of the wider communities we serve, to create a just information society for the benefit of all.'

The votes for president-elect were:
Alex Byrne (Australia) 495
Claudia Lux (Germany) 384 not elected
Winston Tabb (USA) 257 not elected

China wins a place on IFLA Committee

Kohar Rony, Southeast Asia Area Specialist (Ret)
John A Reyes, Philippine Specialist

Congratulations to Ms Jingxia Li from Wuhan Library in China who has been elected as a committee member of the IFLA Public Libraries Section.

Jingxia joined the Wuhan Library after graduating from University in 1984 and has been working there for almost 20 years. She was sponsored to attend the IFLA Conference in Glasgow in 2002 and she has now achieved her dream to play a more active role in initiating, planning and implementing programs for global public library development. She told regional colleagues, 'I have been a beneficiary of IFLA and have a deep gratitude feeling to IFLA, because I got the SIDA Speaker's Grant in 2002. I want to do something more to build our librarian's home, IFLA, the sweet home of worldwide librarians.'

The Asian Division of the Library of Congress has compiled an interesting new bibliography of 5000 monographs about the Philippines in all languages held by the Library of Congress.

The bibliography covers the period 1988-1998 and updates the printed Philippine holdings in the Library of Congress, 1960-1987 published by the Library in 1993. The compilation of this bibliography is an ongoing process; hence, additional entries are added as they become available as the bibliographic entries are all extracted from the Library of Congress Online Catalog. The most significant extra feature of the bibliography is the subject terms added to the records to enhance the value of the bibliography to users and the provision of a classified arrangement of entries. Additional entry points are also provided through the title, author, and name browse lists.

Singapore Journal of Library and Information Management

The editorial board of the Singapore Journal of Library and Information Management, published by the Library Association of Singapore, welcomes contributions on all topics related to library or information science and management, as well as the applications of information technology in information processing. Contributions may be of any length, from brief communications to full-length articles. Please contact Narayanan Rakunathan (please remove '.nospam' from address) or Rajendra Munoo (please remove '.nospam' from address) for additional information.

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