Posted in Uncategorized at 2:48 pm by Sean Fitzpatrick
One of the more lively discussions at LITA Forum was during a session whose topic had more to do with next year’s Forum topic than this year’s: Ken Fujiuchi from Buffalo State College in New York and Kathryn Frederick from Skidmore College in New York gave the audience a lot to consider in their talk “Designing Library Services for the Cloud.”
“We don’t want to trust the cloud, but we’re sucked in anyway,” said Fujiuchi. Budget issues in libraries and patron expectations for certain types of services make moving data and services to the cloud pretty enticing. The bottom line is that cloud computing is more efficient, flexible, and portable. Their examples ranged from storing bib records on cloud servers to speed ILL among institutions that share the records (wait, aren’t we already doing that?) to Google Sites for statistics to speculations that maybe one day library cards can be standardized to simplify borrowing outside one’s own library–just as OpenID does it on the web and ATMs do it with debit cards. I was particularly interested in libraries’ using Google Sites for statistics because of how well Google’s forms interact with Google Docs and then output basic analytics–a perfect fit for keeping track of stats on reference transactions, it seems.
Of course, privacy is a concern, but OCLC’s Matt Goldner reminded the audience that sales units have been trusting the cloud for years with customer relationship management tools like salesforce.com. “It’s been done,” Goldner said. “Librarians just need figure out what needs to be in the cloud for us.”
The discussion led to ideas about what could happen if libraries refused to turn to the cloud for their computing infrastructure. The speakers suggested that librarians will risk losing patrons, saying that the cloud is to IT what Google is to libraries–motivation to maintain relevance.
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:21 am by Sean Fitzpatrick
In no particular order, here are some of the tweets that I thought hit on the big themes of LITA Forum 2009–and some that were funny enough not to leave out. They’re very lightly edited at times. My notes are in italic.
eligermanfirst step is to admit you have a problem (On changes to organizational cultures in IT)
vklineRunning naked through the stacks? Ah… IT perceptions of rogue librarians!
mfrisqueIf you are are always chasing your users you will not catch them. Make environments they want to be in and they will come. (Highly retweeted comment from Liz Lawley’s closing keynote. Her library has an eclectically furnished, locally run coffee shop with *real* furniture, not stuff from Demco)
bmljennyI would like to propose a moratorium on dumping on reference librarians. Let’s dump on gov docs libns instead
kurtwagnerI was confused whether the session “A Hands On Approach to Conversion” was for lib-tech/LITA or LDS folks
mgoldnergave up on tweeting because good info and ideas are coming too fast
mosyluwhat about the things that we’re afraid of finding? they’re out there too. apropos of nothing, Banned Book week ends today
vklineWouldn’t it be nice if our new ideas excited others rather than alarming them. (The future of libraries is IT)
jaimebc: At what point will ideas be serious, not “young”?
lisacarlucci “dont get caught thinking technology is the answer- its the innovative use of tech thats the answer”- @mgoldner(Likely the most-tweeted quote of the conference came out of a last-minute Lightning Talk by OCLC’s Matt Goldner)
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:07 am by Sean Fitzpatrick
If I learned one thing at LITA Forum this year, it’s that if you put a bunch of techie librarians together in one hotel for a whole weekend, they’re going to spend a lot of time dishing on IT. No single session encompassed the overarching theme of the casual break-time conversations better than Kenning Arlitsch (University of Utah) and Kristen Antelman’s (North Carolina State University) talk, “The Future of Libraries is IT (and some people just don’t get IT).”
In their talk, they presented findings from research they conducted on future leaders’ perceptions of organization in libraries. The report, Future Leaders’ Views of Organizational Culture, shows that “future leaders of academic libraries perceive a significant gap between their current and preferred organizational cultures, and that current organizational cultures limit their effectiveness.”
The researchers interviewed 240 future leaders in libraries and got a 72% response rate. Results showed that overall, these librarians prefer more flexible and externally focused culture, feeling thwarted by their current organizations and tending to prefer adhocracy overwhelmingly. Compelling visuals from the study’s findings showed that the more people felt their organization’s IT department was hierarchic, the more they preferred adhocracy.
Study participants clearly showed discontent toward hierarchic organizations’ overdeveloped processes, not valuing risk taking, lack of technical proficiency, and “newly minted” librarians who have more technical proficiency than those who have been in the profession for a long time.
As a deeply conservative profession, according to the presenters, librarians have been slow to react to technological change. They further concluded that we don’t employ technologies intelligently, we fail to develop technically proficient professionals, we don’t invest enough in areas of future growth while continuing to invest in low-value functions (such as print-based processes that don’t translate well into an electronic environment), and traditional organizational hierarchies and management styles thwart younger librarians’ efforts to make an impact (a few audience members were quick to point out that it’s not just the younger librarians who feel thwarted).
The presenters didn’t have a quick solution to fix all our organizational cultures. At least the packed room of LITA attendees understood the problem; the presenters told the crowd that they get a strong reaction from some crowds when they present their findings. “The first step is to admit you have a problem,” they said.
Posted in Uncategorized at 6:53 am by Sean Fitzpatrick
David Weinberger
When David Weinberger, author and fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society talks, I listen up. So his opening the presentation by saying that “the Age of Information is pretty much over” was tough news to take first thing on a Saturday morning. (Although we’ve been hearing that since at least 2002, it’s still pretty shocking for those of us making a living organizing and passing around information.) But LITA Forum’s Saturday keynote speaker quickly explained himself, saying that people didn’t stop using stones when the stone age ended; the information age is over because we’ve moved beyond a time when we place so much value on a relatively small amount of data. And whatever this shift away from the Information Age means, we can be sure it’ll be interesting.
We’ve entered the age of abundance, as Weinberger calls it, where the old ways of reducing knowledge to a few data points and paring things down to, say, whatever can fit on a catalog card or even a full MARC record, have given way to an age where there is simply too much information to handle. While a lot of that information is good, most of it is crap, he said, quickly pointing out that with sophisticated spam filters, pop-up blockers, and so forth, we’re actually better at weeding out the bad stuff than we are at dealing with the good stuff.
“Knowing the world means understanding the chaos and seeing the meaning,” Weinberger said. Handling the good stuff, it seems, is difficult because we like knowledge to be settled and neatly packaged, not chaotic, and in books mostly. And recreating discourse among these books is tedious work: Footnotes are there if we want them, sure, but who really follow them regularly? Books, therefore, and footnotes are dead ends.This is how Western culture has always handled knowledge, said Weinberger. We assume knowledge is basically simple, scarce, and settled. Fortunately, this model lends itself very well to libraries and how they work.
But the Age of Abundance has blown apart the simplicity, settled-ness, and scarcity of knowledge, giving way to more transparency through hyperlinking–just like footnotes in many ways, but “hyper.” Whereas most punctuation tells us when to stop and for how long, the HTML anchor tag element is punctuation, if you will, that tells us to go somewhere. Citing the Scottish philosopher Andy Clark, Weinberger explained that the internet becomes almost a sort of extension of our mind (scaffolding, he called it) so that we think with our brains and store information elsewhere.
Weinberger was quick to point out that there were four ways in which abundance of information makes us stupid. First, we often can’t find information. There’s too much of it. But we’re getting better at building systems to handle the abundance, he said, and we’ll only continue to get better. Second, the digital divide is getting worse as the skill set needed to function in a digital environment grows. Third, we stay within our comfort zones. Where there is so much information, we’re drawn to that which interests us. Last, we’re pretty lazy by nature. Although Wikipedia has rich “Talk” pages to encourage discourse about its articles, most of us pay no attention to them.
While the internet has a huge potential to make us stupid, overall it’s making us smarter, said Weinberger. The web mirrors the fundamental architecture of morality, he asserted, and compassion and curiosity are our bulwarks. And the one thing the web is teaching our children, according to Weinberger, is that the world and its people are far more interesting than we are told.
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:03 am by Sean Fitzpatrick
Will Kurt
The last concurrent session at LITA Form 2009 will be the first one I’ve written about so far (but more will come, to be sure). Sunday morning Will Kurt from the University of Nevada in Reno talked about his new library (lots of cool technology there) and how they’re actively looking toward the future. It’s not just the cloud we need to think about, he said. The future will also bring more integration of computers into our physical environment–ubiquitous computing.
We spend all our time going to computers to do our work, but what if computers could come to us? “How can we integrate computing power into our environment?” Kurt asked.
His library recently bought the Microsoft Surface, a table–an honest-to-God table–that has a big multi-touch computer screen right inside. Because it’s a table, you can put a cup of coffee on it, spread out some books on it, whatever. “People have even changed babies on them,” said Kurt. So rather than going to a computer to do work, the computer is part of an environment where people are already working.
Students’ reactions were mixed. Kurt heard comments ranging from “this thing is sweet” to “don’t get me wrong, it’s pretty sick, but I don’t want my tuition to rise.”
Successful technologies need to be perceived as valuable–not just novel. Though the surface wasn’t built for an educational environment, Kurt had to build some useful applications for it. The first thing he did was to build a copy of Conway’s Game of Life, which was greatly enhanced with the ability to input commands at multiple touch points.
“The Game of Life was neat, but I didn’t expect it to change the way people worked,” Kurt remarked.
So next he created some applications to enhance users’ experience with the anatomical models that the library circulates. Working with the university’s anatomy program, Kurt developed an application that added high resolution images to the Surface to correspond with the library’s models. (See Will’s video below, and even more here.)
“The students were already putting their lab notes and models on the table,” Kurt said. So the Surface adds to the experience.
In the near future, Kurt plans to add images from the library’s media collection to the Surface.
In the first week of the semester, Kurt saw 70 hours of continuous use on the Surface. “It’s really an amazing thing to see,” he said.
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:08 pm by Sean Fitzpatrick
After yesterday’s opening keynote session at LITA National Forum, Past President Andrew Pace told me that there’s a lot of work involved in diversifying the keynote topics, which are set up to be “fact, fun, or fancy.” The Coalition for Networked Information Associate Director Joan Lippincott’s keynote was fraught cold, hard “fact” to support libraries’ need to go mobile.
Joan Lippincott
“80.5% percent of college students today own a laptop,” she began. She added that five years ago that number was less than 50%. “66% of them own internet-capable cell phones,” she continued. For at least a short time after Dan Brown’s new novel The Lost Symbol came out, e-book sales topped print on Amazon, she added, although admitting the statistic was problematic.
Whether they like it or not, librarians would soon have to go mobile with their library’s data. And as the functionality of mobile devices continues to converge, the need to mobilize will only increase.
Despite their going mobile, though, patrons will still need librarians. Lippincott quoted American Libraries’ interview with Cokie Roberts: “The library might be in the cell phone, but we need the people in the building to put the library there” (AL, May 2009)
Web standards and APIs give us no shortage of opportunities to go mobile. And, as one audience member pointed out, end users already have access to a library’s entire holdings on their devices with WorldCat Mobile–if, of course, the library’s holding are up-to-date with OCLC. But Lippincott suggested that however easy it may be to start offering mobile services, libraries still need to develop a cohesive strategy.
As easy as it is to jump on board with mobile services on the web, it’s still unclear what type of mobile data would be most useful. Do users want full MARC records on their Blackberries, or do they just want to know how late the library is open on Sunday and when their books are due? Further, a university library’s cohesive plan to go mobile should include an eye toward what the university itself is doing. If universities are requiring, for example, that every student has an iPhone, then developing apps for the Palm Pre would be wasted effort.
The last, and perhaps most important part to the cohesive mobilization strategy is marketing. Users know what services are being offered, and marketing becomes all the more important when you consider that perhaps the most important target audience for marketing mobile services is those who never use the physical library.
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:30 am by Leonard Kniffel
ALA Executive Director Keith Michael Fiels met with staff last week for a frank assessment of the financial outlook for the Association. On everyone’s mind was what the recession means to libraries and how it will affect our work at ALA.
Fiels indicated that information on ALA’s year-end performance for 2009 and updated 2010 projections will not be available until October, when final close adjustments have been made and following the fall meetings of the Budget Analysis and Review Committee and the Executive Board. With regard to the FY2010 budget (which began September 1), Fiels said that expense reductions would be made as needed if revenue projections must be lowered. Among the reductions that are already planned for FY2010 is the elimination of a planned 1% compensation increase. If those cuts are not enough, Fiels said, management will need to look at further expense reductions that may include furloughs.
Not only has ALA management been reducing expenses, Fiels said, it has also been watching how other associations are faring through what is becoming known as the Great Recession. “We’re doing better than many,” he said. “We are not talking about salary reductions,” as others have, he pointed out. The Chicago Annual Conference in July was a real success, and ALA membership is “holding strong” with a drop of only 2.5% this last year, far smaller than many other associations.
While the final close of the FY2009 budget has not yet occurred, Fiels noted that he expects it to be “very close” (despite the $3 million shortfall projected in February) because of the expense reductions undertaken in March. The fact that they had to be implemented half-way through the year is a testimony, he said, to the feverish pace and enthusiasm demonstrated by ALA staff. “I think that this is good news,” he said, “given that the economy was in free fall.”
The only really bad news in Fiels’s report was the fact that, while the nation’s economy is showing signs of recovery, libraries will lag by a year or two or more. ALA is monitoring the situation across the country (he cited Ohio, California, Pennsylvania, and Michigan as examples of states where major budget cuts had been proposed and/or implemented). “The main reason we are here,” he told staff, “is to help our members and libraries with the challenges they face.”
Posted in Uncategorized at 9:08 am by Leonard Kniffel
Every librarian knows that today’s libraries—although venerable places of learning, innovation, and opportunity—face contradictions in many areas of public perception:
While libraries are popular, they are often taken for granted.
While libraries are ubiquitous, they are not often visible.
While libraries are unique, they face competition.
Out of these challenges was born @ your library: the Campaign for America’s Libraries, the American Library Association’s multiyear public awareness campaign to promote the value of libraries and librarians. The campaign was launched in April 2001 to enlist library workers in reminding the public that effective libraries are dynamic, modern community centers for the pursuit of knowledge, information, entertainment, and lifelong learning.
During National Library Week this year, ALA launched the @ your library website, designed not as a tool for librarians but as a direct pipeline to the general public, aimed at increasing and improving the use of libraries by reaching out directly to all kinds of people of all ages and building on direct outreach efforts the campaign has already undertaken, including multimedia celebrity public service announcements, and partnerships with such nationally known outlets as Woman’s Day magazine, Univision Radio, and the National Baseball Hall of Fame Museum. The website’s implicit and often overt message is simple: Visit your library often, in person and online.
The new website is a pilot project funded by a $270,700 grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York to advance ALA’s long-stated goal of outreach directly to the public, at www.atyourlibrary.org/.
Through the creation of a public-awareness website that is easy to use and that publishes topical and relevant articles not about libraries but about what is available to patrons through them, ALA is using online social media to stimulate library usage, raise awareness of libraries as essential community resources, and create the library users and advocates of the future.
In many ways, the @ your library website represents the goal of the Campaign for America’s Libraries: ALA outreach directly to the public. The website aims to deliver engaging content and to showcase the wide array of resources, services, programs, and other lifelong learning opportunities that libraries offer. For its debut, it was stocked with material focusing on four broad areas, called:
Family Life
Career Development and Job Searching
Teen Spotlight
Kidding Around
Recent features around these themes have included: “Tips for Keeping Your Child Safe on Social Networking Sites,” “Summer Fun on the Cheap,” “Create Your Own Cartoon,” and “How to Negotiate Your Salary.” Clicking under Quick Topics in the right-hand navigation reveals a menu of choices, with a push to the library as the number one source for authoritative and accurate information, a reliable resource that’s there for the asking. New content is posted regularly on a companion blog and in the “What’s New” section, which addresses the four specific target audiences in a spirit of inclusiveness.
Statistics show a sharp rise in library use across the country, especially in the area of job-seeking and self-improvement to compete in the job market. Given the country’s economic crisis, the timing of this component of the site was particularly fortuitous. The @ your library website and associated social networking are tying into and supporting a growing phenomenon—the quest for library resources that help job seekers acquire new skills and find work. Public demand is the best assurance that our nation’s libraries—which outnumber our nation’s McDonald’s—are utilized to their fullest and subsequently supported and funded.
The site also offers recommended books, movies, music, and games for users looking for the latest media. These are authoritative recommendations, many from units of ALA, such as Newbery and Caldecott winners. Most media resources mentioned on the site are also linked to the WorldCat database, which lists the nearest libraries that own the item.
The website has been designed to answer questions that first-time library users may have, such as:
“What’s at the Library?”
“How do I use the Library?”
“Why use the Library?”
In order to encourage people to visit libraries, a search function was incorporated in the top navigation. This enables users to find libraries near them.
The riches that bring the Campaign for America’s Libraries to life lie within our libraries and in the real-life stories illustrating how libraries and librarians positively impact the individual’s quality of life. Since its founding in 2001, the campaign has been embraced by over 20,000 libraries of all types in all 50 states, in addition to those being reached by the 31 countries that have signed on for the Campaign for the World’s Libraries.
ALA’s hope is to not only enrich the content of the website but spread links to related organizations eager to partner with libraries. Major activities planned for the next phase of the project include the creation of more interactivity, including an e-newsletter. A Flickr page is in the works, and social media, including YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, are being used to attract parents, kids, and teens to the site. A logo that can be used on library websites to link to @ your library is also available.
All types of libraries are included in the @ your library campaign to emphasize the craddle-to-grave continuum of lifelong learning that library use represents. This national program provides the foundation from which a series of targeted campaigns are being built. These campaigns provide the flexibility and the tailoring necessary to ensure that the Campaign for America’s Libraries is engaging all members of the library community and reaching out to new users. In 2002, an Academic and Research Library Campaign was launched. A School Library Campaign followed in 2003, then a Public Library Campaign (“The Smartest Card”) in September 2004 and two phases of a campaign for children’s librarians (Kids! @ your library) in 2006 and 2009. Also in 2006, a new toolkit for librarians in rural areas debuted, and in the fall of 2007 a toolkit for young adult librarians was created.
On the Campaign for America’s Libraries website at you’ll find programming ideas, sample press materials, downloadable artwork, tips and suggestions for National Library Week and other promotions, press releases, photos, videos, campaign updates, and more to help you help library users help themselves.
These promotional materials are free and designed to be customized by your library to help you conduct your own marketing and public relations efforts. If you have any questions about the campaign or any of the resources available, contact ALA at atyourlibrary@ala.org. Come and see what’s new at www.atyourlibrary.org and let the campaign staff know what you think.
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:05 pm by Leonard Kniffel
Italian Library Association President Mauro Guerrini receives praise and thanks from IFLA President Claudia Lux.
The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) closed its 75th World Library and Information Congress August 27 with National Organizing Committee chair Mauro Guerrini announcing that the five–day conference in Milan had attracted 3,931 registrants, along with 228 volunteers and members of the Italian staff, 128 exhibitors, 34 press, 30 interpreters and assorted other guests, for a total attendance of 4,496. A jubilant Guerrini noted that local media had paid attention to the conference and its “great success” is a sign of the vitality of libraries, “especially during this global financial crisis.”
Preceding the closing session, at a special panel session on the global economic crisis presciently organized by IFLA President Claudia Lux of Germany, some 50 World Library and Information Congress delegates gathered for the last word on how libraries worldwide are likely to fare in the short run. Panelist Michael Dowling, director of the ALA International Relations Office, emphasized that the involvement of library advocates and lobbyists was going to be essential to funding, as it was in the United States when the e-rate became law, giving publicly funded libraries and schools a small but significant slice of telecommunications revenue. He noted that the American Library Association is leveraging the rising demand for library programs and services to make the case for funding. Panelist and member of the IFLA Governing Board Zhang Xiaolin of China agreed, saying, “This is an opportunity to expand our social responsibility, to put collections and knowledge to use.”
At the closing session, debate over the cancellation of the scheduled 2010 IFLA conference in Brisbane, Australia, was put to rest with the presentation of an official invitation to Gothenburg, Sweden, which stepped in as a replacement when the Australian organizers realized that they could not raise the funding required to host. The IFLA Executive Board had already emphasized in a statement issued in IFLA Express during the conference in Milan, the congress daily, that “there were no contractual costs or penalties associated with this decision.” Agneta Olsson thanked the Australian delegates for their graciousness and for the opportunity to host an IFLA conference in Gothenburg, while the rest of the Swedish contingent cheered to the tune of Abba singing “Take a Chance on Me.” Then came the announcement that Helsinki, Finland, had been selected to host IFLA 2012 and that Southeast Asia and Oceana has been designated as the chosen region for the 2013 congress, opening the door for Malaysia, runner up in the 2010 competition originally won by Brisbane.
U. S. delegate Barbara Tillett receives an IFLA Scroll for outstanding service.
U. S. member of the IFLA Governing Board Nancy Gwinn presided over a brief awards presentation that included Newsletter of the Year, which went to the Section on Literacy and Reading. Gwinn noted that IFLA section newsletters are “almost all electronic and more and more sophisticated.” Among the awards was the presentation of the IFLA Scroll for outstanding service to the federation to, among others, Barbara Tillett of the Library of Congress. Newly elected members of the Governing Board and chairs of Professional Committees were paraded on stage, including Special Libraries Association Executive Director Janice Lachance, new chair of the Management of Library Associations Section.
IFLA Governing Board member Bob McKee, chief executive of the
Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in the U. K., gave a vote of thanks to the Milan organizers in passionate Italian, to much applause, followed by the passing of the gavel from Lux to incoming IFLA President Ellen Tise of South Africa, whom Lux called “a role model activist for libraries.” Tise promised to continue the momentum of her predecessors: “Through all of these moments in its history, IFLA has endured and stayed faithful to those who preceded,” she said, announcing her theme as “Libraries Driving Access to Knowledge.” Knowledge is the key to success, she stated, and “equitable access to information is a fundamental right of all people.” She said that the way to protect that right is for librarians to be fully engaged in the lives of their communities. “We must be concerned about the public good, the principles of equality and human rights for all,” she concluded, and that is especially true for “those whose working environments are not as privileged as ours.”
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:27 am by Leonard Kniffel
ALA Executive Director Keith Michael Fiels, President Camila Alire, and President-elect Roberta Stevens at the IFLA General Assembly in Milan.
The General Assembly of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions met August 26 during the IFLA World Library and Information Congress in Milan, Italy. Formerly known as the Council, the General Assembly has been re-engineered to reflect a swifter, streamlined IFLA, with an emphasis on the core activities and priorities of its active members.
IFLA President Claudia Lux of Germany convened the Assembly, numbering one voting delegate (delegates are allotted according to organizational membership status) over the 68 required for a majority (although there were probably four times that many observers in attendance). Lux reviewed the new IFLA structure, as adopted at last year’s conference in Canada, and talked about strengthening relationships with other organizations, notably the World Intellectual Property Organization, the International Committee of the Blue Shield, and UNESCO. She noted that IFLA membership is growing. “It has never been easier than now to be a member,” she said, thanks to the work of the IFLA staff at its headquarters in The Hague, Netherlands. The congress daily newsletter, IFLA Express, is now available in all seven of IFLA’s official languages—as was simultaneous translation during the congress—English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Russian, and Arabic.
IFLA Secretary General Jennefer Nicholson pointed to a new IFLA annual report and to a continuing emphasis on advocacy for libraries as central to the federation’s mission. The revitalized IFLA website continued to draw praise from delegates. She noted that IFLA is constantly in pursuit of sources of stable funding to supplement membership fees, which constitute only 40% of the budget; registration fees for the congress provide only about half of what the five-day event costs. The total IFLA annual budget is a mere 2.1 million euros. Nicholson also noted that part of the reorganization of IFLA meant viewing professional groups with “a life-cycle approach.”
IFLA Treasurer Gunnar Sahlin of Sweden reported that the federation’s “financial situation is stable” this year, as it was last year, but “we can see some clouds on the horizon” due to the “global financial situation and its impact on libraries and IFLA.” He praised the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for supporting IFLA’s advocacy efforts. “A solid financial situation is a good basis for facing the challenges ahead,” he noted.
Representing the American Library Association in Milan are ALA Executive Director Keith Michael Fiels, Office for International Relations Director Michael Dowling, and ALA President Camila Alire, all of whom gave presentations at one of the 218 sessions that constitute the congress. Alire was one of four panelists at a Women, Information, and Libraries Discussion Group program titled “Libraries Creating Futures for the Women of the World,” hosted by IFLA President-elect Ellen Tise of South Africa. Fiels emceed the American caucus and attended a panel titled “Management of Library Associations: Continuing Professional Development and Workplace Learning,” organized by Sylvia Piggot of Canada, which also featured former ALA president Barbara Ford of the University of Illinois/Urbana-Champaign’s Mortenson Center for International Library Programs. ALA President-elect Roberta Stevens of the Library of Congress was also in Milan for IFLA.
The Assembly agenda included a moment of silence in memory of IFLA members who have died since the last congress in Quebec, and that included ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom Directory Judith Krug, who served on IFLA’s Committee on Freedom of Access to Information and Freedom of Expression (FAIFE).
Also noted at the Assembly was the election of Ingrid Parent of Canada to the IFLA presidency. She will serve as president-elect during Ellen Tise’s two-year term. U. S. delegate Donna Scheeder of the Library of Congress was one of 10 elected to the IFLA Governing Board.
Meanwhile, some of the IFLA delegates disinclined to sit through the General Assembly attended what must be an IFLA first: an international soccer tournament featuring four teams of librarians—one from the Bavarian State Library in Germany, one made up of Italian librarians, one from the Catholic University in Milan, and an international team made up of IFLA delegates from different countries.
