Joan and Juli both recently attended the World Library and Information Congress, a.k.a. the 71st General Conference and Council of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), held in Oslo, Norway, August 14-18, 2005. Hundreds of papers were presented at the conference: here's a note of some that Joan and Juli picked out as especially interesting or relevant for readers of the Dewey blog.
Some of the presentations were made by colleagues from LC and OCLC. John D. Byrum (Library of Congress, USA) suggested how the functionality of library catalogs may be improved by incorporating features commonly offered by online bookstores and web search engines. Glenn Patton (OCLC, USA) reported on the activities of the IFLA FRANAR Working Group in extending the FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) model to authority data; and Beacher Wiggins (Library of Congress, USA) summarized the results of a survey of the extent to which electronic resources are being included in European national bibliographies. Beacher's was a popular topic: other papers on related matters were presented by Christian Lupovici (Bibliothèque nationale de France), who described the BnF's experiments in the preservation and bibliographic control of electronic resources; Maja Žumer (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia), who reported the results of an analysis of the uses and users of national bibliographies; and Unni Knutsen (Oslo University College, Norway), who provided an overview of the state of bibliographic control in the Nordic countries.
Access to multilingual information was a key theme of the conference. Marie Balikova (National Library of the Czech Republic) described a project whose goal is to provide multilingual subject access to the catalogs of seven national libraries in Eastern Europe. Magda Heiner-Freiling (Die Deutsche Bibliothek, Germany) and Patrice Landry (Swiss National Library) discussed the modifications that have been made to the presentation in the second level of the DDC to highlight topics of interest for the national bibliographies of Switzerland, Germany, and Austria. Natalia Kulygina (Russian State Library) explained how authority control is maintained in her library's multilingual catalog. Meanwhile, Jo-Anne Bélair (Université Laval, Canada), Françoise Bourdon, and Michel Mingam (both Bibliothèque nationale de France) provided the rationale for continuing to maintain two French indexing languages -- RVM in Canada and RAMEAU in France -- rather than just one; and Ole Henrik Magga (Saami University College, Norway) highlighted the importance of representing indigenous knowledge in knowledge organization systems.
One of Juli's special interests is the relationship of librarianship and knowledge management. Michael Koenig (Long Island University, USA) evaluated the opportunities presented for librarians by the maturation of knowledge management, and Sajjad Ur Rehman (Kuwait University) and Abdus Sattar Chaudhry (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) reported the results of a study of library-school directors' perceptions of education for knowledge management.
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