Three Days to the Future

In March of 2018, IFLA President, Glòria Pérez-Salmerón hosted the President’s Meeting in Barcelona - home to Palau Güell, Sagrada Família and the 1992 Summer Olympics. The meeting served as the kickoff workshop for the long awaited IFLA Global Vision Report Summary, which presents data from an ambitious global survey of IFLA’s membership (IFLA President’s Meeting, 2018) ¹ . The report provides details regarding perspectives on the challenges the profession believes it will face in the future. This work aligns with other sensemaking activities among library associations around the world (Dorner et al., 2017). Speakers who ranged from government officials to non-governmental organizations and from storytellers to publishers explored a variety of themes important to library and information workers. During the final event of the opening day, IFLA Secretary General Gerald Leitner launched the Global Vision Report Summary. The Report provides ten “Highlights” and ten “Opportunities” for our consideration, and through the Key Findings the report encourages library and information professionals to act locally and think globally when addressing future challenges (IFLA, 2018a). This was a fitting prologue for the work that would occur over the two following days of the IFLA Global Vision Workshop.

An optimist would view the organization of the two-day workshop that occurred after the President’s Meeting as a reflection of an ongoing renewal and rededication to the importance of the input from the many library and information workers who volunteer time as members of the professional committees. This is an effort to ensure local perspectives and help IFLA explore its future development. Under the leadership of Secretary General Gerald Leitner, 2018 is the second year the chairs, secretaries, and others from the sections and special interest groups came together outside of the annual congress to discuss the future of IFLA and the profession. If we consider active and engaged professionals within the sections representative of new voices and groups, clearly IFLA is responding and empowering us to become more closely engaged in the organization as it works toward a new strategic framework.

In the years leading up to the Global Vision Report, IFLA engaged the profession widely in the creation of the IFLA Trend Report. IFLA launched the Trend Report’s Insights Document at the Singapore Congress in 2013. Both the Trend Report and Global Vision Report employ a bottom-up approach that solicits local perspectives with attempts to synthesize them at a global level. For the Vision Report six regional workshops will take place through July of 2018. The workshops will be followed by a Global Call for Ideas as part of the Global Vision Outcomes Report scheduled during the WLIC in Kuala Lumpur in August of 2018. From September 2018 through March of 2019, IFLA will analyze the data and design a way forward with the launch of the IFLA Strategy for 2019 – 2024, occurring in August 2019 at the Congress in Greece (IFLA, 2018b).

The Global Vision Report Summary raises important issues for the profession, and readers should feel compelled to review the report to see all of the data points and information it encompasses. In Barcelona, the second day of the program provided an opportunity to analyze the essence of each of the highlights and opportunities articulated in the report summary. A rapid look at the degree of participation in the survey from which the report emerged reflects the passion of practitioners from throughout the world. Seven continents, 190 states and over 21,000 online votes at least partially answered the question of whether there is a united library field. During the workshop, conversation tables reflected the ten major issues explored in the Report. Participants engaged in a variety of discussions and exercises over the course of two days. The ongoing workshops in the spring of 2018 will replicate this methodology by gathering the perspectives and bold ideas of leaders from associations within each of IFLA’s regions.

From my perspective in the Barcelona meeting, the suggested responses to the challenges articulated in the Report were interesting and varied. As an example, the first Highlight relates specifically to the concepts of intellectual freedom and free access to information. Recognition of cultural and political differences were basic to the discussions and resulted in the suggestion to create a toolkit to advocate for intellectual freedom. Items for this toolkit included:

creation of a map showing where access and intellectual freedom are challenged or difficult,

This type of toolkit would provide an opportunity for the engagement of several sections as well as pulling the expertise of the FAIFE Committee into the mix.

The Barcelona table assigned to work on the Opportunity related to further developing a spirit of collaboration within the field had a great deal of impact on those at the workshop. The conversations indicated that the biggest barrier to collaboration is often language. This is an issue IFLA discusses often and it continues to be one of the organization’s biggest challenges – especially when we acknowledge that native speakers of English often dominate discussions and may unintentionally inhibit the type of collaboration through which partners have an equal voice.

The President’s Meeting and the Visioning Workshop provided us with the opportunity to discuss issues that were identified by our peers at a deep and meaningful level through the global survey. The workshop also provided participants the chance to explore the possible, to move beyond the present, and better understand our working realities. The final question that many of us want to ask, however, is going forward how involved can we be? Will the same type of assets that have been put forward to help us discuss problems and opportunities be available to future members and their elected section leaders? Can IFLA Headquarters continue to grow and become more responsive to the needs of the membership represented by individuals in numerous sections and special interest groups? What stakeholders should be involved in these conversations with IFLA? Finally, how can the membership adjust and reshape the organization to ensure success as the future becomes the present?

As mentioned in previous issues of IFLA Journal, (Witt, 2017) IFLA’s extensive and global sensemaking activities provide an opportunity for researchers to build upon our knowledge base. The workshops and subsequent activities provide an excellent venue for qualitative research and case studies that reveal the challenges, opportunities, and effective practices hidden within the continuous social experiment of global collaboration. The output of IFLA’s surveys and the workshops will be made available as a digital repository for researchers. This will provide a large data-set from which quantitative researches can analyze the responses, perspectives, and permutations of the library and information community on the level of professional opinion, linguistic background, nationality, gender, and professional affiliation. Building a better understanding of the professional practices that we most value, the ideals we share, and the unique characteristics that animate us at a local and regional level will provide a rich opportunity to situate library and information practices into wider cultural and theoretical perspectives.