IFLA Journal

This article presents an overview of the American library landscape and explains the trends and challenges American libraries are facing. US libraries provide people of all ages and backgrounds with access to information and technology. They are community and campus hubs, relied upon to provide the services and support that people need for study, research and lifelong learning. They continue to reinvent themselves to meet the emerging demands in the digital age while retaining their core values of cooperation, sharing and service.

This article reviews the responses of librarians to crises in the ‘old’ and ‘new’ South Africa. It draws on primary and secondary sources to tell the stories of librarians during personal, political and professional crises. States of emergency, censorship legislation, political and xenophobic violence in South Africa since the 1960s are some of the sources for these crises. Librarians and the wider library-caring community have adapted their strategies to champion the freedom of access to information and freedom of expression.

Even though it may seem that information floats on its own throughout the Internet, in reality someone must make policies and financial decisions to gather and organize data and prepare it for retrieval at the appropriate time. It must be stored in various formats in information hubs. These information hubs are essential components of the Internet, itself an essential component of socioeconomic development. But are these information hubs acknowledged in international development planning in the Information Age? This paper discusses information centers – libraries, archives and museums – in the context of coordinated global planning for socioeconomic development and offers a metric by which information centers may be correlated to a country’s social and economic advancement. It concludes with reflections about information components of the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and the needs to gather data and expand information centers in order to achieve sustainable development.

In September 2015, after more than three years of negotiations and intense involvement from many stakeholders, including the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), the Member States of the United Nations adopted the post-2015 Development Agenda to succeed the Millennium Development Goals, Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This paper outlines and reflects on the key steps in IFLA’s campaign and the importance of coalitions and national advocacy to realise the inclusion of access to information, universal literacy, public access to information and communication technology, and cultural heritage in the UN 2030 Agenda.

Library instruction programs for students are still in developmental stages at many Turkish universities. English-language resources are available to teach information literacy skills to students majoring in English Language and Literature. This study surveyed students majoring in English Language and Literature about their attitudes towards library usage and sources. Approximately two-thirds of students had received online information literacy training in English. Student attitudes revealed a distinct preference for Internet sources over library sources and a belief that Internet sources are more likely than library sources to provide them with the information they need for their major classes. However, students that had received information literacy training showed a statistically significant increase in preference for library usage and sources over students that did not receive this training.

Not only is ETH Zurich one of the world’s leading technical universities, with its major collections and archives it also makes key contributions towards the preservation and mediation of national and international cultural assets. The Thomas Mann Archive at ETH-Library is one of these archives. It houses the majority of the written personal papers of the famous German author and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature Thomas Mann. Under the ambitious project TMA_Online, the roughly 35,000 manuscripts and letters and more than 80,000 newspaper articles from the Thomas Mann Archive were described and digitised fully in less than two years. The new web service Thomas Mann Archive Online is now available for searches. This project report outlines the concrete procedure in the various sub-projects, the challenges involved and the results achieved.

In 2004, Library and Archives Canada became one of the first organizations in the world to integrate the services and functions of a national library and a national archives. The vision behind it was the creation of a new kind of knowledge organization, fully integrated, and able to respond to the information needs of the 21st century. Library and Archives Canada has been undergoing steady redefinition ever since.