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Two major international events took place in mid-August 2008. One was the Olympics in Beijing, China. The other was the 74th annual International World Library & Information Congress and Exhibition of the Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) in Quebec City, Canada. The Olympics attracted more people and generated considerably more media coverage than IFLA, but attracting 4,000 librarians from 120 countries to a conference is an impressive feat, maybe even worth a gold medal.

As is common, many congress delegates are from the local region, in this case the United States and Canada. One major glitch: Librarians denied visas for entry into Canada. According to an August 8, 2008 Toronto Star article, 27 delegates had problems obtaining visas and 13 (representing Iran, Nigeria, Colombia, Egypt, Nepal, Pakistan and South Africa) were refused. Several of those unable to enter Canada were scheduled to present papers and the South African librarian actually conducted her section's business meeting from Cape Town, using Skype. A Sri Lankan librarian almost didn't get a visa. Her problem? Believing the Canadian government's website as to the length of time required to receive a visa. It actually took much longer. At a press conference, IFLA Secretary General, Peter Johan Lor, acknowledged there had been a few visa problems and stated that IFLA would urge delegates to future conferences to start the visa process earlier and explain better some of the intricacies of obtaining visas.

The visa situation was not without irony, given the conference's theme, Libraries without borders: Navigating towards greater understanding.

Aside from visas, the congress ran extremely smoothly. The Quebec Convention Centre was ideal, in that meeting rooms and the exhibit hall were on the same floor. This made it very convenient to move from sessions to the exhibits. Poster sessions were situated both in the exhibit hall and in the hallway outside the exhibit hall, which did make for some awkwardness.

Changes in association governance were on the minds of IFLA stalwarts. To streamline IFLA's structure and make it more agile, the number of divisions will decrease from eight to five and some sections will shift divisions. The ultimate aim is to open up some of the arcane policies of IFLA governance and connect all the pieces of the organisation with the ultimate aim of making it more democratic. A new IFLA website, based on open source software, will debut in January 2009. Introduced at the Quebec conference was IFLA's new Secretary General, Jennefer Nicholson, who succeeds retiring Peter Johan Lor.

   RUTH’S HIGHLIGHTS: UNESCO TTT

I attended the second day of the UNESCO Train The Trainer programme, which is being replicated worldwide. The last Asian session is at Wuhan University starting October 21st. The trainees in Quebec came from French speaking countries in Africa and the Caribbean. Day one was the actual training session while Day 2 featured regional reports. The report on information literacy in Asia primarily focused on academic activities in India and did not mention the UNESCO/IFLA Workshop on Development of Information Literacy through School Libraries in Southeast Asian Countries, 19-22 September 2005, which featured country reports from ASEAN countries. It also did not report on the recent work being done at a policy level in Cambodia and Laos, conducted by Gary Gorman and Dan Dorner from Victoria University in New Zealand. For anyone who reads Spanish, Jesus Lau shared his website for the compulsory credit distance course required of first year students at the Clavijero Consortium of Higher Education in Veracruz, Mexico. The web-based course is a compulsory subject by 29 universities and polytechnics in Mexico.

   ASIA and OCEANIA SECTION

I hoped to make contact with the Asian contingent at the Asia and Oceania Section meeting, chaired by Premila Gramage (Sri Lanka). However, only a few of the standing committee members were able to make their way to Quebec, limited by a combination of cost, distance and visa issues. The rest of us were section members or non-Asian observers. The section work had already been conducted at their midyear meeting and is reported in the June 2008 RSCAO Newsletter.

The section has 295 members from 57 countries, not all living in the region. There are close to 250 discussion list members, moderated by Hilda T. Nassar (American University of Beirut).

A major issue facing the section is the sunsetting of ALP, Action through Development for Libraries Programme, an IFLA funding project. ALP has provided important support for regional speakers to attend IFLA conferences and is also funding training attachments. Without ALP funding, Asian attendance at IFLA will be further limited.

Sue Hutley, Executive Director of ALIA, Australian Library and Information Association, reported that in preparation for IFLA 2010 in Brisbane, Australia, ALIA is starting a fund raising programme to support attendance at the conference from representatives from Oceania. ALIA is looking for groups interested in donating to the fund and people needing support. More information will be posted on the ALIA conference website. The Canadian Library Association is also looking for Oceania projects to fund leading up to Brisbane.

The section presented one programme at the conference: From me to you to us: how libraries in Asia and Oceania contribute to global understanding. Papers are on the website under program 106.

   SESSIONS

Copyright is a serious issue for us (not concern over enforcement of copyright law with our users, but the negative impact of restrictive copyright laws on teaching and research). In Copyright and other Legal Matters with FAIFE: Barriers of access to government information, Chabriol Colebatch, from Canada, discussed Crown Copyright. She believes that copyrighting government documents compromises democracy, becoming a tool of government censorship. Publicly funded information should be free. Some governments are using creative commons, automatic waivers and online click, but access and dissemination is still limited.

During the OCLC Industry Symposium: The New World of Metadata, company President Jay Jordan noted that 23 percent of OCLC libraries are now outside the United States. In the past ten years, the number of countries represented has grown from 64 to 112 and the number of non-U.S. libraries has grown by over 350 percent. With the growth of non-U.S. libraries comes the growth of non-English language materials. Karen Calhoun, Vice President for Worldcat and Metadata and author of the Calhoun report: Changing Nature of the Catalog and its Integration with Other Discovery Tools, talked about the need for cataloging to change from library focused to user-focused. Using the analogy of the early belief that the sun rotated around the earth to the reality that the earth was one of many planets revolving around the sun, she said that access to library holdings no longer revolves around the OPAC. She also promoted the need for user tagging and reminded the audience that librarians and users define quality differently. In answer to a question from the audience about what this means for existing standards, Jordan suggested that there is still a need for global standards but we must also open our records for tagging.

   MARYDEE'S HIGHLIGHTS: QUEBEC

After last year's conference in Durban, with its security issues limiting delegates' ability to freely walk around and explore the city, it was refreshing to enjoy the ambience of Vieux Quebec, a charming 400-year old city thoroughly enjoying its heritage. On the opening weekend of the conference, the streets were populated not only with tourists and IFLA members, but also with locals dressed in historical costumes, ready to explain what life was like in Quebec City in the past.

The emphasis on Quebec's French language and culture also permeated the congress itself. The opening ceremony, which featured an address by the Canadian Governor General Michaëlle Jean, First Nation dancers, and the awarding of an honorary doctorate to Ismael Serageldin, Director of the Alexandrina Library in Egypt, by Laval University, was almost entirely in French. Sessions on library services to indigenous people and preservation of indigenous cultures has become a central focus of IFLA conferences.

   SESSIONS

My section, Library Theory & Research, focused its programme on Libraries as Space and Place. Speakers from China, the U.S. and Europe had very different takes on the topic. Conghui Fang, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, advocated for libraries as "third place" for students, Olaf Eigenbrodt, Humboldt University in Berlin, showed how Hanna Arendt's concept of the public sphere can help librarians find a new approach to library as space, and Trudi Bellardo Hahn, University of Maryland, reported on research showing that people prefer traditional library buildings, likening them to "sacred places."

Not all learning at IFLA's World Library and Information Congress comes from structured papers presented from a podium. Some rooms were set with round tables to encourage informal discussion. I attended one on agriculture, which had less discussion than I expected, but an interesting presentation by Peter Ballantyne, President of the International Association of Agricultural Information Specialists on the use of 2.0 tools such as wikis, blogs, tags, feeds, and mashups to share and disseminate agricultural research information.

I was also invited to breakfast meeting by ebrary to introduce its new user interface with a simple search box that resembles the Scopus interface. Additional search boxes let you limit results and expand the table of contents. Coming next year will be additional languages: Chinese was recently added; next up will be Russian and German. A new ebrary Reader was also demonstrated. I found the text to speech particularly interesting. Highlight a piece of text, click a button and you are listening to the words.

   WINNERS

The 2008 winner of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Access to Learning Award of one million U.S. dollars was the Vasconcelos Program in Veracruz, Mexico. Bill Gates Sr. presented the award in person in Quebec. The ceremony was simulcast in Veracruz, so the Mexicans were able to see and hear the presentation. At one point, attendees in Quebec waved to the Mexican audience and they waved back. The Vasconcelos programme was created and managed by the Veracruz Secretary of public education (and wouldn't it be nice if all government officials were as forward-thinking and supportive of libraries) to bring computer and information literacy training to remote areas.

Another award, this one for USD3,000, went to Cuban designer Edgar Luy Perez for his winning design in the international information literacy logo contest. Supported by UNESCO and IFLA, the new logo can be freely downloaded and used as the international symbol of information literacy.

   AU REVOIR, QUEBEC; G'DAY BRISBANE

Our words may not be sufficient to convey the full flavour of Quebec and the World Library and Information Congress. The American Library Association has a short, entertaining video that captures the high points and IFLA, on its website, has posted photos, blog post links, and videos.

Overall, IFLA is an amalgam of education and politics, theory and practice. Programming at the conference remains disjointed. IFLA's theme of Libraries without borders was so all-encompassing that sections and divisions could plan a session on almost any topic and still tie it to the theme. A session on genealogy and local history concentrated on governments' views of data privacy. The web 2.0 discussion group was a mixture of rhetoric and practical advice. Managing libraries in a changing environment was clearly of great interest, as it was in a very large room and every seat was taken. Information literacy remains at least a warm topic, although the sharing of information across the organisation and among sections remains fragmented.

Next year's IFLA conference will be in Milan, Italy. ACCESS readers will probably be more interested in the 2010 congress in Brisbane, Australia. Those dates are 13-19 August. It's too early for full details on the Brisbane conference, but closer to the date, check the conference website and follow the RSCAO newsletter.

Marydee Ojala is the Editor, ONLINE: Exploring Technology & Resources for Information Professionals. (http://www.onlinemag.net) Ruth A. Pagell, is the University Librarian, Singapore Management University.