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December 1995, vol. 27, no. 12
by Iris Winston, Staff Writer
The theme of this year's conference of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), held in Istanbul, Turkey from August 20 to 26, was “Libraries of the Future”.
The Mayor of Istanbul's welcome to the 2 400 delegates from 103 countries spoke of libraries as “a passage between the past and the future”. Ingrid Parent, the National Library of Canada's Director General of Acquisitions and Biblio-graphic Services, one of the Library's five representatives at the conference, calls the location in Istanbul (once Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire) “a fascinating cross between East and West”.
“Our hosts were most gracious,” says National Librarian Marianne Scott. “They offered us many opportunities to benefit from the local culture and history. And the meeting itself was very interest-ing, providing ample opportunities for interaction with colleagues from around the world and especially the host country, many of whom were first-time attendees, able to be there because of the location.”
Always an active member of IFLA, the National Library of Canada will be even more active following this year's committee elections.
Marianne Scott is a member of the Standing Committee on National Libraries, as well as being Past President of the Conference of Directors of National Libraries (CDNL), which holds its meetings in conjunction with IFLA conferences.
Ingrid Parent is Chair of the Standing Committee of the Section on Cata-loguing and is the National Library's representative on the CDNL Working Group on Electronic Publications.
Ralph Manning, Heritage Officer, National and International Programs, in addition to being re-elected Secretary-Treasurer of the Standing Committee of the Section on Conservation, is now Chair and Treasurer of the Division of Management and Technology. As Chair of an IFLA division, he is also a member of the Professional Board, one of IFLA's two primary steering bodies.
Leigh Swain, Manager, Information Analysis and Standards, Information Technology Services, has been Director of the IFLA Universal Dataflow and Telecommunications Core Programme since 1988. He is now also Chair of the Standing Committee of the Section on Information Technology.
During this year's meeting, the IFLA World Wide Web site was officially unveiled. The site was developed by the National Library of Canada in its ca-pacity as host of the UDT office. Gary Cleveland, Library Network Specialist, Information Technology Services, attended the meeting to give WWW workshops and to demonstrate IFLANET, IFLA's WWW service.
“As a director of IFLANET, this made the meeting particularly valuable for me,” says Swain. “This is an exciting and valuable venture to link libraries. It's a major achievement that fulfills a real need.”
In addition to this professional highlight, Swain has a special memory of an evening hosted by German publisher K.G. Saur. “The reception was held on a ferry-boat that toured around the Bosphorus,” he says. “It was a spectacular evening. We had a special view of the lights of Istanbul twinkling down the hillside and reflecting in the water.”
The National Library representatives returned from Turkey with a strong sense of contrasting cultures and the impact of technology on the future of libraries. “Technology can be one of the biggest problems for many,” points out Scott. “There is a perception of a widening gap among the technologically advanced countries and those with agrarian cultures. Then there is a whole different set of problems for countries like Russia or China, which have the technical capability but currently don't have the necessary infrastructure.”
Both location and delegate interaction sharpen the contrasts and underline the IFLA philosophy of international cooperation in library development. Next year's IFLA meeting will be held in Bei-jing, China.
The connection to IFLANET is: www.ifla.org
or: ifla@ifla.org
Copyright. The National Library of Canada. (Revised: 1996-02-23).