The first contribution from our Erasmus Mundus trainees is a set of translations – that present LATINA in three different languages.

Latin used to be the language of Latium – a small region in the middle of Italy.

The village of Rome became the capital of the Roman empire, and Latin became the adminisitrative language of tens of millions of people. In the Middle Ages you were not educated unless you could read and speak Latin. Latin played – roughly – the same role in medieval Europe as English does in the modern world.

The scholars all spoke Latin. But among ordinary people Latin developed into several related languages. Five of them become the national languages of France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Romania. Others became regional languages or dialects, like Catalan, Romansh and Neapolitan.

In LATINA, we use English as our basic shared language. But we also try to include a broader linguistic perspective. People and groups express their identity and culture through their language – or languages. To learn and teach together, we need a common ground. But we also want to accept, to appreciate and to include the diversity of languages in our project.

With LATINA/lingua we make LATINA teaching resourses available in other languages. This week the students have translated the presentation article Learning with LATINA into French, Polish and Spanish. Next week we will discuss and document the process of translation.

A group of five Erasmus Mundus students at Akershus University College will be working as interns with LATINA/lab in November.

In this project the interns will work on the development of teaching materials in English – as well as on translations into Spanish, Polish and French – for the LATINA summer school. This includes the development of a course module for a training course in evidence-based advocacy based on library statistics.

As an introduction, I’ve summarized the project setting:

LATINA
Learning and Teaching in a Digital World is

• an adult education concept
• aimed at students and teachers throughout the world
• to support their passage from the industrial to the digital economy
• by intensive practical exposure
• to digital forms of teaching, learning and production
• in a well-designed learning environment
• that combines appropriate technical resources
• with a strong and supportive social atmosphere

The project itself is developed through

• a development oriented workshop – the LATINA/lab – located at the OUC Learning Centre
• an annual LATINA Summer course, as part of the Oslo University College Summer School (2008-)
• other courses based on the LATINA model during the terms (LATINA Spring 2009, Museum course Autumn 2009)
• a five-year “professional doctorate” program (half speed) for librarians
• other training or trainee programs
• international courses (Finland 2010, Botswana 2011)
• collaboration with institutions in China and Poland

GLOSSA
The Global Statistics for Advocacy sub-project is

• a training program
• aimed at library associations throughout the world
• to develop their ability to “argue with numbers”
• vis-a-vis politicians, publics, and administrations
• in order to promote the development
• of public, school, and academic libraries
• by demonstrating the social, economic and cultural value of their services

The project itself will be developed through

• a multilingual project blog (GLOSSA)
• an set of web-based open educational resources (OER)
• a twelve person expert meeting in the Hague on December 8-10
• a pilot course planned for Poland in the spring 2010
  • materials in English and Polish
• a one-day module at the LATINA Summer course 2010
  • materials in English, Spanish, French and Polish (?)
• a full-day workshop with five parallell courses planned for the main IFLA conference in Gothenburg in August 2010
  • materials in English, Spanish and French (?)

Goals

The aim of the internship period is

• To participate in ongoing development projects (LATINA, GLOSSA, …) as producers
• To learn to work in the “LATINA mode”
  • systematic use of cloud-based digital tools
  • value-added reuse
  • rapid publication (early beta)
  • group oriented
  • process oriented
• To get an understanding of how such projects emerge and develop – including the different interests that surround them
• To reflect on, share reflections on and document what they are learning through the work of translation and realted tasks

Resources

A more detailed work plan – as of Nov. 3, 2009 – is here.

People in villages need trade more than aid.

Peasants without information about the market, are squeezed by middle-men.  Small entrepreneurs need capital in order to get started. Secure and low-cost money transfers allow urban workers to send funds to their rural families without several days of travel. Cheap mobile phones in the South provide answers to these, and many other, questions.

The growth of mobile networks and ownership of phones since 2000 has been amazing. Today, about 3.5 billion people have mobile phones. The latest issue of The Economist has an excellent special report on telecoms in emerging markets. Instead of reading, you may also listen to a brief lecture – with animated graphics – covering the highlights. There is lot of local detail, from the phone ladies of Bangladesh to phone-based micro-banking in Kenya.

The phone ladies got loans from Grameen bank to buy their phones. They could normally repay their loans with rental fees in less than year – and the phones gave them a stable source of income for a much longer period.

A World Bank study shows that local access to information and capital has a clear positive impact on GDP. When Kay Raseroka from Botswana was president of IFLA (2003-2005), she wanted libraries in the South to play the same role as rural communication hubs.

This idea is even more valid now – and should be including in the planning for the GLOSSA project – Global statistics for advocacy.

Quotes

• Mobile broadband …  will be the dominant form of broadband, says Informa’s Mr Jotischky.
• With the falling price and size of laptops and the advancing potential of mobile phones, the two seem to be converging in a new range of devices that combine the power and versatility of a computer with the portability of  a  phone. Already, netbooks can cost as little as $200
• Mobile phones,  it  seems,  are  the  advance guard  for  mobile broadband networks that will extend  internet access to the whole of mankind.
• Mobile phones are now seen as a vital  tool of development, whereas Mr  Negroponte’s  laptop project  [OLPC] has  failed  to  meet  its  ambitious goals.
• But although his engineers have so far only managed to get the cost of their elegant laptop  down to about $150,  they have shown what is possible with a lowcost design, and helped create today’s vibrant netbook market.
• Technological progress in devices and networks seems to have rendered the debate moot: the important thing is that internet access will be on its way to becoming as widespread as mobile phones.
• Obstacles remain even to universal mobile access, and beyond that to universal internet access.
• One problem is a lack of backbone links, particularly to Africa. But a series of new cables is in the works to improve Africa’s connectivity with the rest of the world, increasing capacity and reducing the cost of internet access. The †first of these, the SEACOM cable, eastern Africa’s first modern submarine cable, was completed in July.
• As international links improve and network equipment becomes cheaper and more eff…ective, it will not be diˆcult to provide a low cost mobile broadband service.
• The main challenge will be to reduce the price of access devices. ŒWe need to come up with a mobiledata device  that  costs  $60-80 maximum,
• Netbooks are very good, but we need an emergingmarket netbook that  costs  onethird of  the  price.  With phones, he observes, Œwe got real penetration when we got  below  $35.  Netbooks must be below $100 in price to get real traction.
• The internet equivalent of the village phone model could provide a stepping stone to wider internet access in the poorest  areas,  just  as  village phones did for telephony.
• The Grameen Foundation has already experimented by giving netbooks to a few village phone operators in Uganda so that they can sell internet access as well as telephony.,
• Access to the internet can provide an even bigger boost to economic growth than access to mobile phones.
• To make the most of the internet, users have to have a certain level of education and literacy.
• It is now clear that the long process of connecting everyone on Earth to a global telecommunications network,  which  began with the invention of the telegraph in 1791, is on the verge of being completed.

Resources

• Documentary about mobile phone culture in Africa (42 min)

The first historical use of iron for tools and weapons undermined the social structures – read power and prestige – based on bronze. No more palaces in Crete.

The industrial use of iron for tools and transport destroyed dominion based on land. Power and prestige rushed to the cities.

The internet is equally powerful. It will destroy the social institutions whose main purpose is physical mediation of otherwise interested but unconnected parties.

From conduit to barrier

Over time, those middle layers will simply go away - Quinn Norton writes. They have to, because they are transformed (through no fault of their own) from conduit to barrier.

Spain has an important library community.

The sculpture (right) is called El Alma del Ebro. It consists of letters …
Alma means soul and the river Ebro gave its name to the Iberic Peninsula and its peoples.

In 2006, the country reported

• one national library
• seven central Autonomous Community libraries
• 317 specific-user-group libraries,
• 334 higher education institution libraries
• 1,749 specialised libraries,
• 4,115 public libraries

Visits and loans

• The number of visitors [visits] reached 195 million – or an average of 4.42 visits per inhabitant in 2006.
• Users borrowed 68 million documents, or an average of 1.55 units per person.
• Books constituted 64% of the total.
  • These were followed by audiovisual (19%), audio (9%) and electronic (3%) items.
• The total size of the library collection was 219 million documents
  • TH: Since the press release I quote does not distinguish between the activities of public and other types of libraries, there is no point in calculating turnover rates.

Digital services

• Eighty-six percent of the libraries had Internet access
• Seventy-four percent had computers for public use
• Sixty-eight percent had automated catalogues
• Fifty percent had automated lending
• Twenty-one percent had their own web site

Staff

• There were nearly 23,500 members of staff
  • 6,900 were professional librarians
  • 9,100 were library assistants
  • 7,400 were specialists and other staff
• In addition, another 3,800 people worked with libraries as interns and as volunteers

Source

• Libraries Statistics. Year 2006

Resources

• PL 38/09. A story from Spain. Education is changing in many countries
• PL 33/09. Ten European city libraries. Data from the Tibidabo project.
• PL 30/09. ICT and global learning. Resource links from China, Hungary and Spain.

APPENDIX

National level

• 1.55 loans and 4.42 visits per inhabitant in 2006 (all types of libraries)

Regions

Above 2.00 loans per capita

• 2.79 and 4.68 – Castilla y León
• 2.35 and 4.36 – Castilla-La Mancha
• 2.33 and 5.80 – Cataluña
• 2.27 and 3.06 – Aragón 2
• 2.12 and 6.93 – Navarra (C. Foral de)

From 1.50 to 1.99 loans per capita

• 1.89 and 5.05 – Madrid (Comunidad de)
• 1.82 and 4.12 – Asturias (Principado de)
• 1.73 and 5.33 – Rioja (La)
• 1.53 and 2.94 – País Vasco

From 1.00 to 1.49 loans per capita

• 1.19 and 4.89 – Murcia (Región de)
• 1.16 and 3.57 – Extremadura
• 1.13 and 2.69 – Balears (Illes)
• 1.09 and 4.86 – Galicia
• 1.01 and 3.77 – Comunitat Valenciana

Less than 1.00 loans per capita

• 0.90 and 6.86 – Cantabria
• 0.74 and 3.70 – Andalucía
• 0.67 and 3.43 – Canarias
• 0.24 and 0.72 – Melilla
• 0.09 and 0.38 – Ceuta

The registered number of visits is surprisingly high relative to the number of loans …

In Milan, the Statistics and Evaluation Section set up a small working group to help IFLA develop a course package on statistics for advocacy.

The hotel Acapulco Princess (right) evidently “quotes” the great Mexican pyramids.

Since 2004 the Section has worked hard to establish library statistics as a necessary and important component of cultural and educational statistics. The advocacy project builds on this work, which culminated in a conference in Montreal in 2008 (which I attended) and a volume of conference proceedings.

The task is not easy. We want to train library – or library association staff – to argue with statistics. Understanding and measuring the impact of libraries is a professional task which requires a combination of library expertise and some understanding of practical sociology and statistics.

Scattered results

Such impact studies are not well established anywhere. Even in highly developed library environments – like Finland, Denmark, Great Britain and the United States – we lack solid documentation on a broad front. There are many smaller studies, but these tend to be scattered and ad hoc.

But the interest in documented contributions to social change is increasing.

In Great Britain and the United States, systematic efforts to draw conclusions from the smaller studies (meta-analyses) are appearing. Our project is another example. In several countries – Lithuania, Poland, Romania – the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has initiated impact assessment projects in connection with its Global Libraries initiative. I see these as vital contribution to the field of quantitative assessment – which can support more political and strategic arguments.

Statistics in the South

The moment we move beyond the high industrial North, the basic conditions for statistical work changes, however. Let me take an example from Mexico – where I did some socio-demographic studies once upon a time – as a very young researcher (1969/70!).

In Mexico the national statistical authority – Instituto Nacional de Estadistica y Geografia (INEGO) -  has published a table showing the number of public libraries by state from 2004 to 2008. These numbers look quite problematic.

Both the total number of libraries – and the numbers for every single state – are listed as identical in 2004, 2007 and 2008. The 2008 data are described as estimates – and probably just repeat the 2007 column.

But when the 2005 and 2006 statistics differ somewhat from 2004 in every single state except Tabasco – and rebound to their 2004 values in 2008, I conclude that the 2008 data must be based on 2004 rather than on actual data collection.

How trustworthy the 2004 – and for that matter the 2005-2006 data are, I do not know.

Mexico

• 2004 – 7.211 public libraries
• 2005 – 6.810
• 2006 – 7.010
• 2007 – 7.211
• 2008 – 7.211 [est.]

Veracruz

• 2004 – 508 public libraries
• 2005 – 477
• 2006 – 485
• 2007 – 508
• 2008 – 508 [est.]

Tabasco

• 2004 – 563 public libraries
• 2005 – 563
• 2006 – 563
• 2007 – 563
• 2008 – 563 [est.]

Note

The Working Group consists of Colleen Cook (US), Toni Feliu Oller (Spain) and Tord Høivik (Norway, chair). If you want to follow our work, I recommend visiting – or even subscribing to – the project blog.

Resources

• Instituto Nacional de Estadistica y Geografia (INEGO). Wikipedia. Spanish
• Instituto Nacional de Estadistica y Geografia (INEGO). Wikipedia. English

How do “ordinary people” – I really mean the growing global middle class – or people like Plinius – spend their free time?

We used to watch TV a lot. We still do. But the web is invading our homes and phones.

There are several new ways of mapping the ordinary interests of ordinary people in the aggregate – like

• the search terms they use – see Google’s search statistics
• the web sites they visit – see Alexa
• the categories – our collective mental map – used by popular sites like Yahoo
• the tags they use – see tag clouds all over the place
• the twitter tweets they follow – see below

WeFollow lists the most popular types of tweets.

Like the early internet, the current twitter sphere is slanted towards geeks and the US. Top Conservatives on Twitter (tcot) and the National Football League (nfl) are American phenomena.

But as a whole, a leisure- and media-oriented middle brow culture appears – with a smattering of tea and wine and handmade stuff at the very end of the list. The educated masses follow singers, but not opera; science, but not museums;  books, but not libraries.

Not yet, anyway.

Top hundred

Yesterday, the top hundred were:

Above 50 million

1. celebrity (76 million followers)
2. music (59)
3. socialmedia (51)

From 20 to 50 million

1. entrepreneur (42)
2. news (40)
3. tech (38)
4. blogger (37)
5. tv (33)
6. actor (25)
7. marketing (24)
8. comedy (249)
9. media (22)
10. politics (22)

From 10 to 20 million

1. web (18)
2. sports (18)
3. entertainment (15)
4. writer (15)
5. travel (11)

From 5 to 10 million

1. health (8.8)
2. business (8.6)
3. radio (8.5)
4. musician (8.4)
5. shopping (7.9)
6. internetmarketing (7.4)
7. nba (7.2)
8. author (7.2)
9. fashion (6.7)
10. blogs (6.2)
11. humor (6.1)
12. geek (5.7)
13. food (5.6)
14. design (5.2)

From 2 to 5 million

1. journalism
2. mom
3. artist
4. education
5. fitness
6. realestate
7. seo [search engine optimization]
8. film
9. songwriter
10. technology
11. photographer
12. movies
13. speaker
14. video
15. christian
16. twitter
17. inspiration
18. nytimes
19. actress
20. photography
21. nonprofit
22. games
23. art
24. green
25. journalist
26. webdesign
27. socialmediamarketing
28. dj
29. science
30. singer
31. iphone
32. television
33. producer
34. style
35. women
36. coach
37. advertising
38. finance
39. biking
40. gaming
41. videogames
42. beauty
43. designer
44. comedian
45. search
46. pr
47. activist
48. innovation
49. creative
50. leadership

Below 2 million

1. basketball
2. google
3. startups
4. books
5. money
6. comics
7. networkmarketing
8. airline
9. tcot
10. internet
11. publicrelations
12. hiphop
13. nfl
14. mlm [multi-level marketing]
15. handmade
16. model
17. tea
18. wine

danah boyd (right) was one of the co-authors

This report summarizes the results of a three-year ethnographic study, funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, examining young people’s participation in the new media ecology.

• Young people in the United States today are growing up in a media ecology where digital and networked media play an increasingly central role.
• Even youth who do not possess computers and Internet access at home are participants in a shared culture where new social media, online media distribution, and digital media production are commonplace among their peers and in their everyday school contexts.

• In our research, one of the largest qualitative and ethnographic studies of American youth culture, we examine what sociality among young people actually looks like in this new media ecology as well as how the emergence of networked public culture may shape and transform social interaction, peer-based learning, and new media literacy among young people.
• While there are a growing number of quantitative studies surveying the overall distribution of youth digital media practices, most qualitative research is based on single case studies, making it difficult to document the broader social and cultural contours, as well as the overall diversity, in youth engagement with digital media.

Four basic concepts

• New Media Ecology We use the term new media to describe a media ecology where more traditional media such as books, television, and radio are intersecting with digital media, specifically interactive media, online networks, and media for social communication.
  • We use the metaphor of ecology to emphasize that the everyday practices of youth, existing structural conditions, infrastructures of place, and technologies are all dynamically interrelated; the meanings, uses, functions, flows, and interconnections in young people’s everyday lives located in particular settings are also situated within young people’s wider media ecologies.
• Networked Publics The term networked publics describes participation in public culture (Appadurai and Breckenridge 1988) that is supported by Internet and mobile networks. The growing availability of digital media-production tools and infrastructure, combined with the traffic in media across social connections and networks, is creating convergence between mass media and online communication (Benkler 2006; Ito 2009; Jenkins 2006; Shirky 2008; Varnelis 2009).
  • Rather than conceptualize everyday media engagement as “consumption” by “audiences,” the term networked publics foregrounds the active participation of a distributed social network in the production and circulation of culture and knowledge. [TH: Digitale offentligheter]
• Peer-Based Learning Our attention to youth perspectives, as well as the high level of youth engagement in social and recreational activities online, determined our focus on the more informal and loosely organized contexts of peer-based learning.
  • Our focus is on describing learning outside of school, primarily in settings of peer-based interaction. While adults often view the influence of peers negatively, as characterized by the term peer pressure, we approach these informal spaces for peer interactions as spaces of opportunity for learning.
• New Media Literacy We examine the current practices of youth and query what kinds of literacies and social competencies they are defining as a particular generational cohort, experimenting with a new set of media technologies.
  • To inform current debates over the definition of new media literacy, we describe the forms of competencies, skills, and literacy practices that youth are developing through media production and online communication in order to inform these broader debates.

Alongside the conceptual framework that structured our study, throughout this report we frame youth engagements with new media in terms of emerging practices, or genres of participation. Genres of participation help us interpret how media intersect with learning and participation.

• Friendship-Driven Genres of Participation A friendship-driven genre of participation characterizes the dominant and mainstream practices of youth as they go about their day-to-day negotiations with friends and peers in given, local contexts that center on relationships fostered in school and other local community institutions.
• Interest-Driven Genres of Participation An interest-driven genre of participation characterizes engagement with specialized activities, interests, or niche and marginalized identities. In contrast to friendship-driven participation, kids establish relationships that center on their interests, hobbies, and career aspirations rather than friendship per se.

Three forms of participation

(W)e have identified three genres that correspond to differing levels of commitment and intensity in new media practices.

• Hanging out is primarily a friendship-driven genre of participation in which young people spend their casual social time with one another. In interest-driven groups that result in friendships, we also see hanging out activity, but most youth hanging out is with local friendship-driven networks.
  • Sites such as MySpace and Facebook, and communications technologies such as instant messaging (IM) and text messaging, provide a lightweight means for youth to stay in ongoing social contact and to arrange real-life gatherings. Furthermore, new media provide a topic for conversation, in the form of forwarding and linking to interesting pieces of online media, as well as a focus for activity, such as when youth play social games together or share music.
• Messing around represents the beginning of a more intense media-centric form of engagement. When messing around, young people begin to take an interest in and focus on the workings and content of the technology and media themselves, tinkering, exploring, and extending their understanding.
  • Some activities that we identify as messing around including looking around and searching for information online as well as experimentation and play using a range of media, such as digital and video cameras, music and photo editing software, and other new media. Messing around is often a transitional genre, in which kids move between hanging out and friendship-driven forms of participation to more interest-driven genres of participation.
• Geeking out involves the more expertise-centered forms of interest-driven participation surrounding new media that we found among some of the gamers, fans, and media producers we encountered in our study.
  • Geeking out involves intensive and frequent use of new and, at times, relatively obscure media, high levels of specialized knowledge, alternative models of status and credibility, and a willingness to bend and/or break social and technological rules.

New social practices

• Robust participation in networked publics requires a social, cultural, and technical ecology grounded in social and recreational practices.
• Ongoing, lightweight, and relatively unrestricted access to digital- production tools and the Internet was a precondition for participation in most of the networked public spaces that are the focus of attention for U.S. teens.
• Further, much of this engagement is centered on access to social and commercial entertainment content that is generally frowned upon in formal educational settings.

• Networked publics provide a context for youth to develop social norms in the context of public participation.
  • Networked publics have altered many of the conditions of hanging out and publicity for youth, even as they build on existing youth practices of socializing, flirting, and pursuing hobbies and interests.
  • Contrary to fears that social norms are eroding online, we saw almost no evidence that participation in networked publics resulted in riskier behavior than teens engaged in offline, and their online communication is conducted in a context of public scrutiny and structured by welldeveloped norms of social appropriateness, a sense of reciprocity, and collective ethics.

• Youth are developing new forms of media literacy that are keyed to new media and youth-centered social and cultural worlds.
  • Youth are developing a wide range of new literacy forms through their informal new media practices, including deliberately casual forms of online speech, formats for displaying public connections, and new forms of appropriative literacies such as customizing MySpace profiles, mashups, and remixes.
  • Efforts to address new media literacy need to take into account the specific social and cultural contexts that are meaningful to youth.

• Peer-based learning has unique properties that drive engagement in ways that differ fundamentally from formal instruction.
  • In both the friendship-driven and interest-driven sides peers help to drive learning.
  • Peer-based learning is characterized by a context of reciprocity, in which participants believe they can both produce and evaluate knowledge and culture, and in which they can develop reputation and receive recognition from respected peers.

In these settings, the focus of learning and engagement is not defined by institutional accountabilities but rather emerges from kids’ interests and everyday social communication.

TH: All text comes from the executive summary.
I’ve added emphases (bold) and  sub-titles (green).

Resources

• White Paper – Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project (pdf)
• Danah Boyd. Wikipedia
  • CC-pictures on flickr
• Mizuko Ito. Wikipedia. Project leader
  • Ito’s bentoblog

Plinius

• PL 58/08. Reports from the frontline. The MacArthur Foundation financed a three year study on youth and the web.

In an ideal world, somebody should pay me for all the hours I spend blogging.

That world is approaching. This morning I received a cool proposal from Technorati – the big blog aggregator:

An automaker is interested in providing vehicles for bloggers to test drive for a few days and to write about the experience.

They’re not looking for auto bloggers, they’re looking for lifestyle bloggers who cover topics like travel, fine dining, and culture. They will arrange the drop-off and pick up of the vehicle.

If you’re interested, please contact list@technorati.com with your blog name, content overview, URL, Technorati authority, and contact information.

Take that, mechanics! These cars will go to lifestyle bloggers who care for fine dining and culture.

Like Plinius

;-)

Last year, in Quebec, IFLA set up an excellent resource page with links to photos, blogs and videos from the conference.

This year, in Milan, a similar page was created. It was still useful, but the content was not well updated during the conference, as the unofficial blog collection of Loida Garcia-Febo shows. Below I’ve integrated the two – and added some more from the comments to Garcia-Febo.

Which shows the value of including a comment button. To map the flight of birds, recruit the swallows – and also listen to their twitter at #ifla2009.

Blogs in English

Listed by IFLA

1. Information New Wave (Loida Garcia-Febo) – nice blogroll
2. Italian conferences (Michael Heaney) – substantial
3. Libraries Interact (many Australian contributors)
4. The Library of Digress (Christine Rooney-Browne) – substantial
5. Marketing-Mantra-for-Librarians (Dinesh Gupta)

Added by participants

1. AL Inside Scoop – very informative
2. From the Chief Executive’s Desk (Bob McKee) – very informative
3. Libraries Interact
4. Plinius (Tord Høivik) – unforgettable  ;-)

Blogs in other languages

Listed by IFLA

1. فارسی (& English) – Irandoc in IFLA (Shima Moradi, Nadia Hajiazizi, Mohaddeseh D. Esmati)
2. français – Comité français IFLA: le blog
3. français – CultureLibre.ca (Olivier Charbonneau)
4. français – Figoblog (Emmanuelle Bermes)
5. français – IFLA Milan 2009 (Danielle Mincio)
6. français – IFLA 2009 – En route pour Milan (Jean-Francois Gauvin)
7. français – Site dédié aux professionels de l’information-documentation (French, Jean-Philippe Accart)
8. Nederlands (& English) – The Flemish Librarian (Karolien Selhorst)
9. Português – o bibliotecário 2.0 (RC) (Julio Dos Anjos)
10. Srpski jezik (& English) –Digitalizacija, Digitalne Biblioteke (Bogdan Trifunovic)

Added by participants

1. Entre olas de informacion (Spanish, Nicolás Robinson García)
2. LIS Traveler (German, Sebastian Wilke)
3. Senbibdoc (French, Antonin Benoît Diou from Senegal)
4. o bibliotecário 2.0 (RC) (Portuguese, Julio Anjos) – very visual – see the Scientology stand at the exhibition
5. BibliothekarInnen sind uncool (Dutch)
6. Plinius (Norwegian, Tord Høivik) - a scintillating work of art for those happy few that are able to read my native tongue

The collective Romanian blog ProLibro had one IFLA post: Despre IFLA (23 august) pe internet

Some notable comments

Michael Heaney

• From now on GB will mean Governing Board for me. …
• IFLA is governed by 10 elected representatives, the five Divisional chairs representing the sections, the chair of the Professional Committee, the President and President-Elect.
• I also have to find a line between breaking GB confidentiality and writing a totally uninformative blog! Not unnaturally, many of the issues are of a sensitive nature.
• The wifi issue is deferred to the December meeting of the Professional Committee.
• Emanuele Bellini of the Digital Research Foundation in Florence [is] talking about a trust p2p network for access to open archive resources. There are lots of ways of storing complex objects but Emanuele maintains that the host institutions are concentrating on storing the data and not giving enough attention to the user needs.
• The deep web and broken links get in the way. There’s no user enrichment/annotation .
• Library Theory and Research Section is next and I get there as they are discussing their Strategic Plan. They also agree to make a conference on LIS Education and Research Cooperation and Collaboration, already in planning for Sweden next year, into a Satellite meeting of  the IFLA conference.
• The thing that strikes me about this meeting is that it’s all very subdued  during the course of the meeting but as soon as it’s over everybody starts talking animatedly.

Christine Rooney-Browne

• There are various reasons why one would expect and rely upon free access at an international library conference; and these reasons extend well beyond being able to check our e-mail!
• For example, during sessions it can be beneficial to be able to check out the speaker’s online biography; or to look up a specific library website; or even to bookmark some of the resources that the speaker has highlighted on their slides to our Del.icio.us accounts…
• I’m well aware that there are many more library and information professionals back home in Scotland who would have loved the chance to attend, but are unable to because of financial constraints, lack of time, etc…
• Many of these people follow my updates on Twitter; some specifically to be kept informed about news and ideas filtering through from the sessions I attend.
• A fellow IFLA blogger [fame at last!] referred to this as citizen journalism.  And I guess it is…
• On day two [in Torino] I presented our paper: “Public libraries as impartial spaces in the 21^st century…possible, plausible, desirable”?.
• I think my favourite part of the whole session came after my talk, during the coffee break when I had the opportunity to speak to a lot of people from the audience.  It seems that the commercialisation of the public sphere is a hot topic internationally and I had some great discussions with librarians from America, Australia, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy Japan and Norway.
• Many were also keen to discuss the potential of Web 2.0 and virtual libraries and seemed interested in receiving future updates about my PhD research into measuring the social value of public libraries.

AL Inside Scoop

• Michael Dowling, director of the ALA International Relations Office, emphasized that the involvement of library advocates and lobbyists was going to be essential to funding, as it was in the United States when the e-rate became law, giving publicly funded libraries and schools a small but significant slice of telecommunications revenue.
• He noted that the American Library Association is leveraging the rising demand for library programs and services to make the case for funding.
• Panelist and member of the IFLA Governing Board Zhang Xiaolin of China agreed, saying, “This is an opportunity to expand our social responsibility, to put collections and knowledge to use.”
• IFLA Secretary General Jennefer Nicholson pointed to a new IFLA annual report and to a continuing emphasis on advocacy for libraries as central to the federation’s mission. The revitalized IFLA website continued to draw praise from delegates.
• She noted that IFLA is constantly in pursuit of sources of stable funding to supplement membership fees, which constitute only 40% of the budget; registration fees for the congress provide only about half of what the five-day event costs.
• The total IFLA annual budget is a mere 2.1 million euros. Nicholson also noted that part of the reorganization of IFLA meant viewing professional groups with “a life-cycle approach.”
• Some of the IFLA delegates disinclined to sit through the General Assembly attended what must be an IFLA first: an international soccer tournament featuring four teams of librarians—one from the Bavarian State Library in Germany, one made up of Italian librarians, one from the Catholic University in Milan, and an international team made up of IFLA delegates from different countries.
• One of the most misunderstood aspects of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s annual $1-million Access to Learning Award is the fact that it is given not for ideas but for achievements, and not for potential but for sustainability. This year’s winner, the Fundació n Empresas Publicas de Medellín (EPM Foundation) in Colombia, which was recognized for its Network of Public Libraries, makes the concept clear.
• “They’ve been a good model for not just a city resolving its longstanding problems but in seeing that libraries belong at the table, that they are partners in the initiative.”

Bob McKee

• The Biblioteca Braidense, incidentally, added a whole new dimension to the discussion about libraries and “convergence.”
• Usually (at least in IFLA land ) this means convergence between libraries, archives, and museums. At the Biblioteca Braidense the room was so hot it raised the real possibility of convergence between a library and a sauna!
• But hey, a few glasses of birra Moretti in the Bar Magenta later in the evening and I was soon refuelled and rehydrated with fluid and essential trace minerals (malt, hops, barley….).
• I also pointed out that the use of libraries in the recession – particularly public libraries – is increasing, a point also made by panellist Michael Dowling from the USA.
• The challenge for libraries therefore, in the UK and the USA, is to meet increasing demand while resources are being reduced – I suggested that reductions in the UK would be in the order of ten percent across the board in the public sector.
• In terms of advocacy, the threat to libraries can be an opportunity to get libraries on the agenda for local people, local and national media, and local and national politicians.
• In terms of leadership, reduced resources can be an opportunity to remodel and modernise library services.
• In terms of our business, there is an opportunity both to refocus the value we add (around the concepts of knowledge management and information literacy), and also to leverage the brand value of libraries as a route to market for commercial interests.
• The discussion which followed, with contributions from the floor, was fascinating. [Read more]