School Libraries and Resource Centers
Chairperson's Report
2006
At the Oslo Conference Anne Clyde (Iceland) and I were re-elected to the positions of Chair and Secretary respectively.
Prior to that meeting, Vincent Liquete (France) had resigned his position as the Newsletter Editor. Julie Tallman who had agreed at the 2004 World Library and Information Congress to be Information Officer announced her resignation following the Oslo conference.
This meant that there were a number of positions to fill and volunteers to be recruited.
As you will all be aware things were made even more complicated with the sudden death of the Standing Committee Chair. Anne Clyde was a tireless advocate for this Section. Her untimely departure had an immediate impact on the well being of many aspects of school librarianship and not least on this Section and on IFLA more generally.
It was my belief that the Section would be best served by maintaining a consistency in the approach that had been adopted by Anne and her team and I therefore resigned as Secretary so I could contest the position of Chair. Elections were conducted for the positions of Chair and Secretary and as a result I am the Chair and Lourense Das (The Netherlands) is the Secretary.
Subsequently I confirmed the appointment of Niels Damgaard (Norway) as Newsletter Editor. (This was an appointment made by Anne following discussions in Oslo.) I also appointed Bruno Vermeeren (Belgium) as the Information Officer. I want to express my sincere gratitude to these three officers for their significant contributions throughout the year. On behalf of the Section I wish to acknowledge the special support offered by their employers namely Lourense (her self!), Niels (Biblioteksentralen AL) and Bruno (VVBAD) without whose support their contributions would be far weaker.
You will recall that Anne Clyde mentioned in her 2005 report that:
Because of the relatively large number of responses [to the Oslo Open Session], many of which deserved to be presented in public, I entered into an agreement with Dr Dianne Oberg, Editor of School Libraries Worldwide, the research journal of the International Association of School Librarianship (IASL). The January 2006 issue of School Libraries Worldwide will be devoted to the theme "Policy: Empowering School Libraries", with Dianne and me as joint editors. As this report was being written, we were in the process of contacting the authors of selected proposals, and we anticipate that we will publish six to eight papers on this topic. This partnership with the IASL journal will help to publicise the work of the Section.
The role of Theme Editor was taken up by me and a selection of papers was published. Details can be seen at
http://www.iasl-slo.org/slwjan06.html
As you will be aware the Standing Committee met during the Mid Year period as a follow up to the Division III meeting. Both meetings were held in Copenhagen. Helle Barrett (Sweden) was most helpful in making pleasant arrangements for us with respect to a meeting venue. The major accomplishment was the determination of the program for Seoul. Minutes of these meetings have been circulated.
Two meetings of the leadership team were convened in July during the IASL Conference in Lisbon. These face to face meetings are a real bonus and provide a more meaningful dialogue than do purely electronic meetings and communication; however, they are not often possible!
A further meeting between the leadership of IASL, and IFLA Schools section and Sjoerd Koopman (IFLA HQ) was convened to discuss the possibility of greater communication and collaboration among the two peak bodies. The response to this was very positive and once the draft guidelines are available they will be circulated for discussion.
You will recall that in Oslo we agreed to share our Open Session at Seoul with the Section for Asia and Oceania. Anne Clyde represented this Section in those negotiations. Some time later I discovered that the Asia and Oceania were under the impression that we would contribute the full 4 hours for this joint session, whereas our Section had expected that each would contribute two hours. This together with other differences of attitude and approach finally lead me to seek support from HQ to disentangle us from the joint arrangement. Given our success in previous joint arrangements this was a disappointment to us. You will have seen from LIFLANET that we have an interesting array of presenters for our session.
You will recall that our Section has agreed to give up one of its Open Session hours in Durban to a pool of hours for the Division III program which will take the theme of social responsibility. We will pool our remaining hour with Public Libraries (1) and Reading (2) to enable a strong joint Open Session on HIV AIDS. Details of these will be developed in Seoul.
James Henri
16 August 2006
