Saturday, August 22, 2009

IFLA conference: 1st report

I am lucky enough to be in Milan for the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) World Library and Information conference. This is a truly international association and conference. I am just starting as a member of the Information Literacy Section committee of IFLA (website is here: http://www.ifla.org/en/information-literacy) (I used to be on the Management and Marketing section committee). There are 20 members, from different countries/continents, though Europe is particularly well represented. Ruth Stubbings (Vice-Chair, CILIP CSG Information Literacy Group) is the other person from the UK.
Today was a day for meetings of the various IFLA committees and boards, and I attended the first of the IFLA IL Section meetings (there is also one at the end of the conference). Sylvie Chevillotte was chairing her last meeting, handing over to Maria Carme Torres. Antonio Calderón Rehecho remains Secretary and The Information Officer is Albert K. Boekhorst. IFLA recently restructured their website, so Albert has had to put older material into that structure. Dalia Naujokaitis (from Canada) and I are going to work with Albert on web communications. Lisa Hinchliffe offered to take over production of the Section's newsletter from Linda Goff (pictured above), who has come to the end of her time on the committee.
We were reminded that the IFLA Guidelines on Information Literacy have now been translated into a number of languages, most recently Greek. There was a lot of discussion about the satellite information literacy event for next year. Next year's IFLA conference was going to be in Brisbane, but it has been switched to Gothenburg, a somewhat controversial decision which has meant that existing Australian plans had to be abandoned.
Tomorrow is the opening session, and a chance to have a look at posters, I think. On Monday there is a session on literacies, with several speakers, and on Wednesday there will be a session about using the Information Literacy logo (see http://www.infolitglobal.info/logo/). I will blog these and other sessions that have some relevance to IL. I probably won't be doing much liveblogging, though, as wifi costs 10 Euros for 4 hours, and there don't seem to be many power points to plug in my laptop during long sessions, either. However, otherwise the conference venue is very smart.

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