Category Archives: International conferences

Top Five CPDWL Blog Posts in 2019

CPDWL Section members frequently blog about their work, programs or activities throughout the year. Here are our top 5 popular blog posts with the highly numbers of visits:

5. With 880 visits, CPDWL Podcast Project: Episode 1 is our 5th most popular post. It kicked off our podcast series featuring Loida Garcia Febo! (Published in October 2019)

4. CPDWL Satellite Meeting 2019 in Zagreb, Croatia: RECAP is the 4th most highly visited post in 2019 with 896 visits. (Published in September 2019)

3. “New Resources for Library Advocacy” by Loida Garcia-Febo (Published August 2019) and “INELI-MENA-Egypt: Librarians as Motors of Change” by Heba Mohamed Ismail (Published in July 2019) are our third most visited post with over 900 visits!

2. With over 1k+ visits, our post on “Digital Tools That Can Change Your Librarian Life” is the second most popular blog post of 2019. The recording is also listed in the post. (Published October 2019).

1. With over 4k+ visits, “Wellness for Library Workers” by Loida Garcia-Febo is our most popular blog post of the year! (Published August 2019)

Stay tuned for 2020, we have of interesting posts coming soon!

New Resources for Library Advocacy by Loida Garcia-Febo

Each librarian is an advocate. Each library worker is an advocate. Library associations like IFLA and ALA, and library schools have developed a myriad of materials, including courses, to help library advocates continue advocating to keep libraries open, funded and equipped. As we know, programs and services provided by libraries are essential to better the education and lifelong learning of the communities they serve at academic, public, school and all types of libraries.

This past year, while I presided the American Library Association, I worked with the incredibly talented ALA staff members and my Presidential Advisory Board to develop new library advocacy resources which I am very happy to share in this post.

A comprehensive website that became a one-stop clearinghouse for all-things Advocacy: http://www.ala.org/advocacy/

Videos to help libraries use the power of storytelling to impact advocacy:

Video #1 – Advocacy 101: Getting Your Library Story in your Local News

Page includes a checklist for reaching out-  http://www.ala.org/advocacy/media

 

Video #2 – Advocacy 101: Inviting Your Elected Leaders to Visit Your Library

Page includes a visit checklist- http://www.ala.org/advocacy/tour

Video #3 is a playlist! – The many reasons why ALA members advocate for libraries #IamALA (Fabulous campaign you can customize for your own library association!) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLY6JdvV7ZFZvjSwPO2Wj7MIkS40uKC8E1

Additionally, I would like to share that as a part of the ALA’s 2019 National Library Week celebrated last April, and ALA’s year-round advocacy work, ALA released two new superb tools to help library advocates and libraries across the USA share their story on digital platforms: a Live Stream and Video Storytelling Checklist and a Social Media Advocacy Toolkit! The resources were rolled out in conjunction with the amazing #MyLibraryMyStory initiative, a video and social media effort that aimed to encourage library advocates and users to create and share videos and content about their libraries on social media such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

I hope you can review these resources and adapt them to the needs of the libraries in your city, region and country. I am happy to connect with you about them!

Loida Garcia-Febo

International Library Consultant

Immediate Past President, American Library Association

IFLA Governing Board Member 2013-2017

IFLA CPDWL Member

German library conference 2019

The German library conference took place this year in Leipzig. It is the biggest annual librarian`s conference in Europe. More than 260 lectures, workshops and hand-on-labs were presented together with a huge exhibition of hard-, software and services. Under the title “Libraries for change”  4000 librarians from Germany, neighbouring countries and abroad met to discuss a huge variety of topics. Societies are changing and libraries have to follow these dynamics with innovative concepts and lifelong learning staff members.

The last three years ALA was partner of the German library associations. This year the official partnership switched to the Netherlands where the libraries are very active to promote “the library as a third place”.

One of the recurring themes were fake news and the best way to deal with. “Put the focus on the victims and the outcome instead of only looking at the offenders and give them another platform to be famous” a journalist proposed.

More and more frequently, false information is scattered across all communication channels in order to influence public opinion or to discredit other-minded people. Portrait photos with quotes take out of context, which are often distributed via social networks, are just the tip of the iceberg. In their role as information brokers, libraries must counter this and empower more and more people to distinguish fake news from actual news. There were plenty of suggestions for such formats for work on the ground – especially for the youth. And of course the education and strengthening of our own staff is very important not only in this context.

More than 400 presentations are already uploaded online for those who want to recap or had not the chance to participate in Leipzig. Most of the follow-ups are in German but some are in English, too.  And more will be uploaded in the next weeks. At the  BIB Opus publication server you can also find the presentations of the past German and Austrian library conferences, the articles of some German library journals in fulltext and more.