Hi all,
How fast September comes, and for quite a number of us, it would be mid-year reviews soon. We have survived IFLA WLIC 2013 and I am proud to say that Singapore has done well in its hosting duties. The informal feedback I got from the fellow participants was that the folks in the red shirts (our volunteers) were much better than the folks dressed in black (the career conference workers).
I have asked for some of you to share your thoughts on the event, but I guess everyone’s been kind of busy. Here’s what I could come up (please remember, that our memories gets worse the longer we drag this!).
Opening event – someone had asked me why we had a Dragon Dance to open the show. I remembered replying to her that – I thought it was more to highlight that Singapore was probably the first to make use of LED lights on the dragon’s body for the Dragon Dance routine. Someone had asked me later why we chose the Yellow/Gold colored Lions for our Lion Dance which came later – the significance of the color gold is more for Prosperity.
Later that evening we held an LAS event and we had the honor of having the President of Singapore to grace the occasion. We also gave out complimentary copies of the book In 99 words: stories librarians tell. (For those of you interested we are working out some logistics to get it to your libraries and LAS members).
For those of you interested in the IFLA Trend report – that is available on the web, please check: http://trends.ifla.org/
I manage to pop by 2 of the Plenary Session and came away with some interesting learnings and thoughts:
Dr. Cherian George covered the issue of the “Unknowing the known” – how authorities have made used of media to propagate their own agenda, I also learnt a new term “truthiness” – that people aren’t necessary interested in truths but what versions of it that coincided with their world views. I had asked the question about whether this is relate to the issue of the “Pain of knowing” versus the “Pain of not knowing” and argued that it is our duty as librarians to reduce the “pain” of discovery of factual information.
Dr. Parag Khanna spoke about “Ubiquitous Libraries in a Hybrid Reality” – and highlighted how in one episode of Jeopardy in America, IBM build a machine to beat two champion human Jeopardy players. What struck me then was the sheer volume of information available these days. In the internet of humans, we already lost out the war to Google (and other search engines) in terms of indexing it. There is still an Internet of things – as machines become more intelligent and interconnected – they have the capability and capacity to pass even more information to each other (much more than the Internet of humans) – my question which I had no opportunity to ask was that “Would libraries need to build our own machine to index the information? Do we even have a choice in this?”
Another session that caught my attention was the release of the “Standards for Libraries in Higher Education” by ACRL. For those of you interested, you can read more at: http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/standardslibraries
Amongst the poster sessions, what struck me most was a low tech approach by Norway librarians in their Track The Traffic process. For those of you interested in this low-cost and yet effective method to measure activities within your libraries, you may want to check out their creative commons website at:
https://sites.google.com/site/practicalstatistics/topics/ttt-method
It’s not possible for any one person to cover all aspects of IFLA, so any help that you can offer would be useful for the rest of our members, so I look forward to your contributions about your learning points from WLIC 2013. Thanks in advance!
Yit