When you gather librarians from 128 countries in the same city you get a scent of what is sometimes forgotten in the daily work. That librarians are working for the same cause world wide. I had the chance to debate this with some Swedish librarians this morning.
Yesterday I had a look at the exhibitions and was preparing for todays poster sessions. The variety of different ways to empower people and giving access to knowledge and learning is amazing:
Some examples: Using social media to inspire dialogue with patrons (Poster 171), A classification project for children (Poster 100), Sharing knowledge by networking – Information literacy instructors promote open access in Finnish Universities (Poster 99) and the amazing caterpillar project that has made books available to more than 100000 people in Africa (Poster 15)
This was also the theme in this mornings session about Metropolitan libraries with public libraries. Very different approaches to innovation in libraries and how to bridge reading of physical books with the online world. To try something as difficult to make a conclusion of these interesting and diverse presentations it must be: the need to make space for and acknowledge the need for innovation to make sure libraries will be as relevant in the future as they were in the past. To focus on the library as playing a major role in education and learning for life and focusing on the community the library is situated in.
It is about the little positive differences libraries make in peoples lives every day and about the big spectacular projects that drive libraries further in the technologic development that makes us relevant for the online generation.
Let´s celebrate the successes, learn from our failures and let´s get to work. We all have a network of more than 3000 librarians from all over the world to learn from.
Jan Holmquist 