The calm before IFLA WLIC...

So I'm currently some 10,000 kilometres from home here in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia awaiting my very first International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) World Library and Information Congress (WLIC)...that's a lot of words for the one hyperlink but think a kind of Quidditch World Cup for libraries and you’re along the right lines! 😉

One thing IFLA WLIC definitely is not is the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA) Conference, which took place last month in nearby Singapore and - though something entirely different - can easily be mistaken for IFLA WLIC at first glance through sloppy web searching... Nope, this a library conference and one on a scale which is entirely new to me: some 120 nationalities will be represented by the 3,500+ information professionals in attendance.

I am very honoured to be able to attend thanks to a John Campbell Trust bursary. John Campbell was a founding member of the Institute of Information Scientists - the organisation which combined with what was the Library Association in 2002 to become CILIP: The Library and Information Association. I continue to work with CILIP in my capacity as a committee member and Editor of the International Library and Information Group (ILIG) Focus journal - a role through which I get to hear all about some fascinating projects librarians are doing all over the world. Check out the ECHO Refugee Library (Greece) and "Gift a book and get a friend" (India) projects as recent examples featured in the journal.

Thanks to ILIG I also had the chance to attend my first CILIP Conference, held in Brighton earlier this year. This was an inspiring, if frantic, experience! I helped to run the EUROLIS/ILIG stall, so my time was spent rushing in and out from sessions to the exhibition and back again...which was exhausting, frankly and in no way helped by an exasperating debacle involving mugs I'd ordered as freebies for our exhibition stand; in short I ended up chasing this shipment throughout the conference but they never actually arrived, alas. Still, a huge upside of being at a stall was I got to meet most of the other attendees at the Conference and talk to them about the work I do both for ILIG and for the Royal College of Nursing (RCN). I felt the Conference also usefully highlighted the sheer variety of roles within the profession and people's fondness for their chosen vocation.

Brighton hosted this year's CILIP Conference, attended by over 500 librarians

I came back to work enthused and soon after gave a talk to my colleagues about what CILIP does, as well as the major changes which have been happening within the organisation in the last few years. I genuinely feel these changes are finally helping to move CILIP in the right direction, as evidenced by the support it has been able to offer in major library campaigns like the fight to keep libraries in Northamptonshire open. Ayub Khan, CILIP President, spoke about a major drive to put international issues high on the list of priorities for CILIP (including a new International Policy) and to recruit more international members during his breakfast seminar at the CILIP Conference too, all of which I thought was encouraging as well.

Whilst I'm at it, a quick shoutout to the Librarians With Lives podcast which was showcased at #CILIPConf18 - great to see this brilliant project, which allows librarians to tell their own life stories, really taking off! Thanks to students at Sheffield University too for writing about their highlights of the CILIP Conference on their Information School News blog. So far as the day-job goes, we’ve again had recognition at the RCN Library and Archive Service for the work we do. Following on from the internal recognition we achieved as the 2017 RCN's Team of the Year, this time we were shortlisted by The Bookseller for their Library of the Year Award!

Ok - we didn’t win this one but it was great just to be acknowledged for some of the fantastic work that our unbelievably talented and enthusiastic team continues to do.

Liverpool Central Library - very worthy winners of

The Bookseller's prestigious Library of the Year Award

The theme of the IFLA Congress this year is library outreach which is an important aspect of what we do at the RCN. In our case this is about reaching out to our 435,000 or so members all over the UK. As an example, I recently got to speak in front of around 100 graduating nurses at Keele University, highlighting what our library service can offer them. We also attend events across the UK with a nursing/medical theme and aim to make contact with as many academic and NHS librarians in the region we have chosen to cover (in my case the West Midlands) as we can. We continue to strive to support library users wherever they happen to be physically located, something which has increasingly been enabled through being able to offer as many of our resources and services available online as possible.

Getting information out to patients wherever they happen to be will be a key focus for IFLA WLIC. On that note, tomorrow I'll be at the Evidence for Global and Disaster Health (E4GDH) satellite conference - it's a brand new IFLA Special Interest Group and a subject area I'm completely unfamiliar with but I'm very keen to find out more!

IFLA WLIC itself kicks off on Friday (24th). Can't wait!

The gardens outside the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre - site of this year's IFLA WLIC

Reference:

Flood, A. (2018) 'Family claims win in high court challenge to Northants library cuts', The Guardian, 14 August 2018 [Online]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/14/family-claims-win-in-high-court-challenge-to-northants-library-cuts [Accessed 22.8.2018]

#wlic2018 #IFLA #Outreach #KualaLumpur #Malaysia #CILIPConf2018 #TheBookseller #InternationalLibrarianship