IFLA 2009 and Digital Preservation

The IFLA World Library and Information Congress in Milan was officially closed on Thursday, August 27 2009. Leaving president of IFLA, Claudia Lux of Germany, together with Italian Library Association President Mauro Guerrini and new IFLA president for the period 2009-2011 Ellen Tise from the South Africa, put stress on successful conference, despite economical troubles pressuring the whole world and libraries also. Almost 4.000 registered delegates and more than 500 people working directly at the Congress is real success, it must be said. On the other side, there was obvious small number of exhibitors (comparing with this year ALA conference in Chicago, everything from the exhibitions look smaller and less attractive). More experienced IFLA delegates told us, who was at the IFLA for the first time, that IFLA Congress has been obviously hit by the crisis. But, nevertheless, IFLA for myself was great experience and what I like the most is actually the chance to hear a lot of excellent presentations and meet colleagues, which is the basic of every successful conference.

Talking about excellent presentations, I must say that digital preservation was one of the dominant topics at IFLA 2009. And I tried to follow just the sessions with some relation to digital preservation or digitization. The first event actually was a day long workshop on preservation of audio-visual materials, held in RAI Milano, which I mentioned here. On August 25 the sections of Geography and Map Libraries, Science and Technology Libraries and Division of Special Libraries held together a session titled Cultural heritage preserved: the role of digital maps, which was so informative and inspiring, but also useful for practical part of work, because it provides a lot of information about digitizing maps and cartographic material. You can find those papers here, session number 121. There was also a Genealogy and Local History section's session on August 26, titled Opening up our cultural heritage through digitization and collaboration. Colleagues from the USA, Denmark, Canada and Serbia (myself) were concentrating on various approaches of preserving cultural heritage and history through digital preservation or by using Web 2.0 technologies. Compared with some other sessions I attended, like the session on e-learning Lifelong e-learning and libraries, held on August 27, the audience was very interested to ask questions about the presented projects, with a lot of questions addressing technical aspects, to my surprise.

At the end I must thanks to all colleagues who encouraged me to overcome difficulties of attending the two most important LIS conferences, IFLA and ALA, in the same very troubled year. I've succeeded! And for IFLA part, my huge THANKS go to the addresses of all institutions who helped me to travel to Milan: Istituto centrale per il catalogo unico from Rome, Public library "Vladislav Petković Dis" from Čačak, Serbia, Association of Serbian Libraries and The city of Čačak. Thank you very much and I appreciate your help!

04.09.2009. 10:11

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