IFLA’s Boston Conference
Breaks Attendance Record
More than 5,000 people from 150 countries assembled in Boston August 16–25 for the 67th annual conference and exhibition of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA). The record turnout marked the federation’s first return to the United States since its 1985 meeting in Chicago.
Among the 259 conference sessions were the keynote address by author Jonathan Kozol and lectures by Librarian of Congress James Billington, American University law professor Peter Jaszi, and Laurence Prusak, director of IBM’s Institute for Knowledge Management. Kozol, who has written several books about poverty, gave a bitter indictment of the failure of public education in America’s poorest areas and contrasted those failures with successful educational efforts in many other countries, from Norway and Sweden to China and Cuba, calling the situation in the United States “socially and economically enforced apartheid.”
Conference delegates enjoyed visits to area libraries at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and numerous specialized, public, and academic institutions. Fueled by the U.S. government’s denial of visas to all but one of the Cuban delegates to the convention, the IFLA governing council and various workshops grappled with how to expand international library cooperation, especially with Cuba.
A full report on the IFLA conference is scheduled for the October issue of American Libraries. Conference papers are available on the IFLA Web site.
Posted August 27, 2001.
|
