International

1995 - IFLA Istambul (Turquie)

Libraries of the Future 

IFLA Section of Biological and Medical Sciences Libraries Newsletter, 1995, vol. 16, n° 4, pp. 1-5.

This year, the IFLA General Conference took place in Istanbul, one of the most famous and beautiful cities of the world : meeting point of Europe and Asia, near the magnificent Bosphorus, whose light changes at every moment of the day passing from gray to blue. The city of Soliman and Ataturk is rich in archeological treasures that link our civilization's past to the present.

The theme of this year was "Libraries of the Future" . It reflected the challenges of our time and we all kept in mind that, as IFLA President Wedgeworth remarked, " we generate excitement about new programs, new technologies and fresh ideas, let us not forget the millions of people around the world trapped into a world of ignorance due to illiteracy and poverty".

The participation and enthusiasm from our Turkish colleagues became obvious : 625 were present among 2390 total participants and all seemed to appreciate that an IFLA Conference took place in their city. One very nice thing we observed in Istanbul was to see Turkish people dancing and singing altogether, particularly during the social events!.

The site choosen for the Conference was of high standard, in the Swisshotel, near the Bosphorus, and young librarians (from Turkish library schools) were always very helpful if you lost your way.

A year of elections

This year was a year of elections : new officers for the Biological and Medical Sciences Libraries Section had to be elected. To assure democratic elections, Section members were invited by mail, prior to the Istanbul meeting, to nominate officers. Answers unanimously confirmed the re-election of Frances Groen as Chair and Monique Cleland as Secretary/ Treasurer. However, Jean-Philippe Accart (hospital librarian in Argenteuil-France) confirmed his willingness to accept the Chair, when the present Chair was unabled to accept a renomination. Monique Cleland will serve a second term as Secretary/Treasurer for the term of 1995-1997. Christine Deschamps (University of Paris-France), active member of the section, has been elected to the Executive Board of IFLA and all members wished to Christine a successful job !

A Joint Program on "Archiving electronic journals"

Frances Groen, as chair of the committee for the Istanbul conference, was responsible for the professionnal program. During the previous conference in Havana - Cuba last year, a Joint Open Session with the Section of Science and Technology Libraries had been decided under the main theme "Archiving Electronic Journals". This session took place on the Wenesday, 23 August and was very well attended (about 120 participants). Under the chair of Patricia Yocum (University of Michigan), four speakers expressed different points of view from the perspectives of the editor, the vendor, the provider, and the librarian. Two reactors (Yasar Tonta from the University of Ankara and Jean-Philippe Accart) were asked to give their comments. Here are the most relevant papers :

Wim Luijendijk, Vice-President of EBSCO-Europe, gave the first paper from the serial information providers perspective, considering that products and services provided by all will have to change, but missions will stay the same. Although traditionally handled by librarians, archiving electronic journals could be handled by publishers, libraries, serial information vendors or even back issue dealers. Document delivery providers will be involved in the archiving of articles in anticipation of customer requests.
Christian Lupovici, Production Director at CNRS-INIST in France, spoke about the impact of electronic publishing on the information system. Things are changing a lot with digitized information : authors are now able to publish and to distribute their own production ; libraries and document delivery centers have to change the way they work, particularly with informatics and telecommunications tools. The INIST, both database producer with PASCAL and document delivery center, could be the link between these two activities in collaboration with every partner.
Chris Kluiters, from Elsevier Publishing, gave us a paper that dealed with the first commercial pilot project in Europe, on the electronic availability of some 120 journals published by Elsevier Science in the fields of Economics, Computer Sciences and Applied Mathematics, at the Campus network of Tilburg University in the Netherlands. Most of his discussion was the most important topics in the license such as : authorised user community ; authorised usage ; user feedback and commercial terms and conditions.

Of course, many questions were raised by the two reactors and from the audience such as : could we consider electronic publishing as a linear extension of print ? Does the kind of communication permitted by electronic publishing have anything to do with print ? Some other points merged : the electronic providers are generally able to provide only the last few years. Moreover, all the new providers coverdifferentyears and this is troublesome for librarians because they have to check each source. One major obstacle is that all these new providers have their own list of journals and documents.

In conclusion, the archival value is significant : digitized documents lend themselves to retrieval tools as well as to various, simultaneous forms of storage (plain text, database form, hypertext). Curiously, the virtual nature of the electronic text potentially provides a much more efficient tool to archive knowledge than prints with all its apparent solidity. But for users, two things are really the most important : the access to information and the accuracy of information.

The Biomed Section work

The two Standing Committee meetings of the Section were full of matters for discussion:

• The first one is a special concern expressed in regard to the diminishing number of section standing committee members. Special efforts will be made during the next two years to recruit new officers. Some part of the world have no representatives (from China, Japan, Australia or New Zealand). But the Section has already accepted corresponding members.
• The Section will work too on distributing the Newsletter in electronic format by January 1996, on the IFLA server, IFLANET. The brochure of the Section (in English, Spanish and French languages) will be available too on IFLANET.
• The Standing Committe adopted a new goal regarding the development of new leadership in medical librarianship. This goal is directed towards the younger or more junior medical librarians in the country in which the IFLA meeting is held.
• And, last but not least, the Section has to prepare a program for the next IFLA Conference 1996 in Beijing. The theme of the Conference will be : The Challenge of Change : Libraries and Economic Development. The Section program would probably consist of papers contributed by authors from the People's Republic of China and from United States and Canada under the theme : East meets West in Medical Librarianship. Then, a one day tour on traditional Chinese Medicine, including a visit to a hospital or pharmacy, is planned.

Each delegate who participates in the IFLA meeting carries away unique memories of the conference, and that was really true in Istanbul this year. Exchanges and talks were quite intense during the week : definitely, IFLA prepares libraries for the future.