02IFLA2002

IFLA 2002

By Derek Law

IFLA is one of those organisations of which most people have vaguely heard but which seems distant and irrelevant to our daily library concerns. Next year IFLA visits Glasgow for its annual conference and perhaps 4000 librarians from all over the globe will arrive there. Many of these will be from the UK and all of us should consider going.

To begin with perhaps an explanation of what IFLA is. The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions was founded in Edinburgh in 1927 and, following the collapse of FID, is now the only global library organisation. It has almost 2000 members in over 150 countries – mainly national associations or individual major libraries - including a growing number of personal affiliates. It is an association with official status with UNESCO and so is in effect recognised as the world voice of librarianship on matters as varied as intellectual property rights and cataloguing standards. It provides the forum where colleagues from all countries can meet and share views on difficult issues and can attempt to do our part to address problems as deep as the digital divide. As James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, rather grandiloquently put it in a speech to IFLA in Boston this year, it is the place where we can share the dreams and ambitions of our friends and prevent them turning into the war cries of our enemies.

And perhaps an explanation of what it is not. It is not simply a tourist agency for senior librarians with well heeled travel budgets. Nor is it an irrelevance which does and achieves nothing. It is a growing and expanding body which represents all of us at international fora from WIPO to G8, where the decisions are made which ultimately affect us all.

So far so irrelevant. IFLA is perhaps the sort of body which if it didn’t exist it would be necessary to invent it. Libraries have a phenomenal history of co-operation and so we take for granted a whole variety of standards and activities ranging from international inter-lending to MARC record exchange. In fact, all of these have to have a formal basis and IFLA is the channel for that. IFLA has a shadow G8 group who liaise with G8 to ensure that information issues and the digital divide are constantly in the minds of ministers. It runs or manages for others huge training programmes for librarians in developing countries. It works with other organisations on freedom of information issues and after the recent Mapplethorpe case at the University of Central England and the right wing censorship cases in France we should not comfortably assume that these are problems of distant dictatorships. It has recently produced both school library and public library manifestos, now adopted by UNESCO, which proclaim the basic rights of citizens. In short it is an umbrella under which we all shelter, but which operates at a largely invisible level.

As well as the small central core of staff based in The Hague (and incidentally managed by Ross Shimmon, former Chief Executive of the Library Association, IFLA has over forty standing committees. Some are subject based, such as Art Libraries or Science Libraries, while others are function based such as Reference or Cataloguing. Each of these committees determines a programme of work and plans a programme at each annual conference. The work programmes vary enormously from research to subsidiary conferences. Many involve publications and IFLA has a major publishing programme managed by K. G. Saur, much of which consists of guidelines and standards. The committees consist of those interested in international work, most of them technical experts and few of them chief librarians. The UK has always had a significant level of involvement in these committees.

Finally, there is a distributed set of activities called the core programmes, based at various national libraries around the world and undertaking work on such grand themes as the Universal Availability of Publications and Universal Bibliographic Control. These programmes are currently undergoing substantial changes in nature and format.

The highlight of the IFLA year is the annual conference, when (according to venue) some 3000-5000 librarians gather in one of the world’s major cities. Next year it’s Glasgow, then Berlin, Buenos Aires, Oslo, Seoul. The conference lasts a week – ten days for those with committee commitments – and is an amazing festival of what is happening in libraries. Although steps are being taken to improve and rationalise it, the conference runs typically from 9-6 every day with anything from 12 to 20 parallel sessions, workshops, visits, evening receptions, a huge exhibition, fringe events, mobile library meets, a half marathon – but most of all the opportunity to meet colleagues from 150 countries and to learn new things and to learn just how diverse yet unified a profession we are. You can meet medical librarians from countries wondering how to deal with chemical warfare being used against dissidents but officially denied, or librarians dealing with genealogical reference work, or web page designers or children’s reading groups, or those dealing with special needs of the deaf or visually impaired, or art librarians or editors of library journals, indeed anything that interests you no matter how esoteric. All library life is there – in five official languages and a myriad of unofficial ones. IFLA is back in the UK to celebrate its 75^th birthday, so we can also expect a number of birthday events to add to the celebration of our profession.

IFLA was last in the UK in 1987 in Brighton and will probably not return to the UK for 20 years or so. So for most of us this will be the only opportunity to experience the world’s largest, friendliest, most polyglot conference of librarians. A festival of all that is different and all that is best in libraries. The scale and cultural richness are overwhelming, the chance to meet and befriend colleagues from anywhere in the world and find out about their professional lives will not be repeated. And as happened at Brighton, a lucky few will catch the IFLA bug and spend mid-August for years ahead following the IFLA caravan – and perhaps making the world of libraries just a little bit better – or at least trying to!

If you want to find out more, the website is at http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla68/index.htm - or contact Ridgmount Street where Rob Palmer and the conference team will be happy to send on a brochure.

Derek Law

Librarian,

University of Strathclyde

And Treasurer of IFLA