IFLA 2008 opens on Sunday, August 10.
Polar hero Roald Amundsen - in London Royal Wax Museum, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
The program has links to many of the presentations. I note seven contributions from Norway - same number as in Durban:
Libraries depend on their users.
Libraries are text providers rather than temples. Governments and politicians are increasingly watching traffic - or usage - rather than buildings and collections. They speak the language of economy and look for tangible benefits from their investments in libraries and other public services.
Going down to the children’s section in Tromsø (Norway)
We may call this NPM - New Public Management. Some embrace it. Others oppose it. But nobody can avoid it. In the industrial economy culture was insulated from the market. In the post-industrial economy, culture IS the market.
IFLA will be in Quebec- and I must brush up on things Canadian.
The questions below were posted on an International Tourism Website. A funny guy answered them …
Q: I have never seen it warm on Canadian TV, so how do the plants grow? (UK)
A:We import all plants fully grown and then just sit around and watch them die.
In January 2009, the next BOBCATSSS conference will be arranged in Portugal.
The Lello bookstore in Porto …
The conference is organized by library students. As their web site shows, they are getting more sophisticated year by year.
I hope to go - and have submitted a workshop proposal, which is registered as paper no. 76. Plugging for LATINA in 2009 is also part of the plan. Top secret, of course.
If learning and teaching is production rather than reproduction, they turn into research and development.
Ready for exploration.
Academic libraries have always supported research as well as teaching, As the walls go down, libraries and librarians must move deeper into the R&D process - or be bypassed by a new generation of web-oriented students, teachers and scholars.
A trigger is a short video that poses a question, a puzzle or a dilemma - without giving the answer.
Triggers are used to to set off discussions in groups and classes. As part of the LATINA program, our participants have created three triggers - and posted them on YouTube:
The cost of computers continues to fall.
High tide in Venice …
Schools and colleges, students and educators, are sliding into an environment where everybody has instant access to the web - everywhere and all the time.
As a teacher I now have two options. I can try to oppose the tide - or try to rise with the waters that gush in.
Teaching is moving - slowly - from paper to digital technology.
Replacement
The first step is replacement:
The long civil war in Sudan destroyed much of the educational infrastructure in the South.
After the peace agreement between North and South in 2005, reconstruction began. Norway is involved in a program to develop university education in the South. Three of the participants in the LATINA course, from the Upper Nile University, come from this program.
