Jan Holmquist

At #nextlibrary2015 I did an Ignite talk about global librarianship. I shared the vision that in a world where countries compete on knowledge to get knowledge jobs – life long learning is valuable. Therefore libraries are more important than ever.
We need to know how people learn, unlearn and relearn – and we need to have our own agenda about how we learn on a global level so we can be one step ahead as information professionals – and be even better to support the learning of our communities.

By being inspired globally we learn different answers to the challenges we all face as libraries – and we can translate our inspiration into acting locally in our communities – to make our communities smarter.

The examples I shared was Buy India a Library where four information professionals (Including yours truly) set up a crowdfunding project to build a library attached to a school in Mysore, India. More than 100 wonderfully generous people from all over the globe supported our effort – so though we (at that time) we enabled people to fund a brand new library.

23 Mobile Things took the inspiration from the original 23 Things project and transformed it into a learning program for information professionals with the scope to explore the potential of mobile tools for delivering library services. It was a local project for the staff at Guldborgsund Public Library and we then turned it into a global learning project in cooperation with State Library of New South Wales (with my wonderful colleagues Mylee Joseph and Kathryn Barwick). Today there are several English language versions in USA, Australia / New Zealand, Singapore and the Philippines and versions in German, French, Russian, Norwegian and Danish.
At Guldborgsund Public Library we have just launched a version of the program with 16 Mobile Things for the public (in cooperation with Kalundborg Public Library) (New blog post coming up soon!)

Thank you for feedback to everyone at Next Library – and thank you to all the people I connected and learned with and who shared your time and knowledge with me.

The Ignite presentation format is very challenging. 5 minutes – 20 slides advancing automatically after 15 seconds.