IFLA Journal

Keynote Address to the World Library And Information Congress: 72nd IFLA General Conference And Council, 20-24 August 2006, Seoul, Korea, in the Opening Ceremony. Outlines the pivotal roles that libraries must perform in determining whether or not the age of knowledge and information will succeed in attaining its desired goals. Reviews the place of libraries in the intellectual and cultural traditions of Korea and efforts to develop these traditions in the 21st century.

The prevailing models of information literacy education (ILE) are contextually grounded in Western social and intellectual structures. For the most part these models follow the taxonomy developed in the 1950s by Bloom, which has been adopted as appropriate for developing societies without considering the contexts from which they are derived, and in which they are being applied. For ILE to be meaningfully embedded in the educational fabric of a developing country, it is important to take account of a range of contextual variables that affect how and why individuals learn. Focusing on ILE through the lens of cultural contextuality, this paper addresses three questions in relation to ILE in developing countries: How do we define information literacy in a developing country context? How do we best determine the educational objectives of information literacy education in a developing country context? How can cultural awareness improve information literacy education?

Three librarians from Rutgers University Libraries collaborated on the program ‘Using Assessment as a Tool to Improve Learning’ at the 69th IFLA General Conference and Council in Berlin, Germany in 2003. The workshop was designed to provide participants with an expanded understanding of assessment, and experience with using it effectively as a tool to facilitate improved learning. The presenters framed the workshop with a pre-workshop assessment and post-workshop assessment. The responses from the pre-workshop assessment supported the workshop’s design, provided an initial understanding of the individual participants’ contexts and experiences, and formed the basis for the workshop’s small group activities. The post-workshop assessments offered valuable suggestions for future programs. The article shares the essence of the workshop in the words of the facilitators, each of whom focused on assessment at a different level. The three modes discussed are teacher/instructor, learner/student, and programmatic/institutional.

This paper highlights some of the issues affecting access to knowledge in South Africa and other African countries, as well as the implications of international intellectual property agreements, focusing mainly on copyright. It will show that the majority of these countries are struggling to meet the very basic requirements of international intellectual property agreements, yet some of them are being pressured by developed countries to adopt even stricter intellectual property regimes through the Intellectual Property Chapter or ‘TRIPS-Plus’ in Free Trade Agreements. The paper highlights the impact of the some of the TRIPS-Plus provisions on education, libraries, and people with sensory-disabilities, as well as public health and development in general.

Peace is more than the absence of war, violence or conflict. Between 1960 and 1980 Africa fought 32 wars, which led to the loss of millions of lives whilst over a million people became refugees. These conflicts, which still continue, along with poverty and diseases, have all threatened the stability of the continent. There are many concepts in peace building, among which a major one is creating clearer channels to disseminate information between the common people and policy makers; this is the role of librarians, especially women librarians. Women librarians’ roles include: the provision and dissemination of useful and accurate information on peace and peace movements and women’s groups; fighting for freedom of access to information; improving the reading habits of women and children; organizing exhibitions and talks on peace; ensuring life-long education for women and girls, etc. African governments have to ensure access to current information by African women through the provision of functional libraries and Internet facilities for them to be properly informed and participate in global discussion and for them to be empowered.

The National Library of Australia is collaborating in a national program to improve the nation’s research information infrastructure. These activities have provided a focus for the Library in its engagement with the university community. The Library has developed integrated discovery services, actively participated in three research information infrastructure projects, and worked with partners on the problem of sustaining university repositories to support long-term access. The Library is an active partner in Project ARROW (Australian Research Repositories Online to the World), which is developing a solution for institutional repositories in collaboration with a commercial vendor, and also in the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR), where the Library is helping to develop a sound approach to assessing the obsolescence risk of file formats, advising on a strategy for including preservation metadata in the repositories, and seeking to influence the future development of open source repository software to make use of preservation metadata.

The Institute of Scientific and Technological Documentation and Information (IDICT), of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment of Cuba, (CITMA) convoked a meeting in October 1995 of some governmental and non-governmental libraries and information centres that manage political, social and economic information. The purpose of the meeting was to create a working group to promote the development of such type of centres in the field of social sciences. The group was charged with promoting a closer relationship among the centres and the development of collaborative projects, stimulating partnership, cooperation and coordination of specific tasks. This paper describes the work and achievements of the group, the Comité de Coordinación de Centros de Información Política y Social, COIPS, which now comprises 32 centres.

Russia is among the information-richest states with information resources vast both in traditional and in new technologies. The Russian state, acknowledging the provisions of international documents on these problems, seeks all the possibilities to make access to the most important information easier for everybody. Among the institutions responsible for collecting, organizing and disseminating the information, libraries play a significant role. At the beginning of the 1990s Russian legal reform specialists came to the conclusion that the major problem is where to locate authoritative sources of official information and legal knowledge to ensure they could be open to general use. Russian experts considered that such a source could be Russia’s public libraries. The library system built during the years of Soviet power proved to be both steady and flexible and the library community was the most receptive of all to change. The paper describes how, building on the solid base of libraries, the government reformers in 1993 created specialized models of information access throughout the country, such as centers of business information, centers of legal information and their modifications. The system is functioning very effectively.

Chinese ancient books and local history documents are collected in archives, libraries, museums (ALM), and other academic institutions all over the country. This paper introduces the cooperation in document conservation and cataloging that has occurred between ALM in China. It briefly describes The Digital Local History Project constructed by the National Library of China. Finally, it proposes the concept of cooperation between archives, libraries, and museums in digitizing local history.

With the growing popularity of knowledge management, the need for frameworks for evaluating the impacts of knowledge management on organizational performance has been recognized by practitioners. Despite the wide implementations of knowledge management, there is yet no standardized framework for measuring the performance within organizations. This paper provides an overview of the approaches to evaluate the contributions of knowledge management implementations to organizational performance. It presents methods such as return on investment, balanced scorecard approach, qualitative case studies, and success case method to aid practitioners to identify and develop the evaluation frameworks. Thus, it seeks to serve as a foundation for further research and development.