IFLA President's Meeting

1. Building the Agenda and Making it Happen
Closing remarks delivered by Donna Scheeder, President IFLA
IFLA President’s Meeting
Toronto Canada
April 7, 2016
I will begin by thanking all of you for the hard work that you have put in
for the last two days. The combined insights from our panelists and our
table discussions have identified challenges, opportunities and most
importantly actions that can help us to build our own vision of what the
standard will be for excellence in every library. To quote a previous
speaker, “the future is not something we predict, it is something we
achieve through action.”
The theme for this President’s meeting was born in the IFLA Trend
report. Trends represent change and we have two choices when it
comes to change. We can either create the change we want or ignore
change and end up living in a world created by others where libraries
and our profession cannot thrive. Our keynote speaker Don Tapscott
delivered one of the most important insights of this meeting.
Blockchain technology means an even more accelerated pace of
change. Our world will continue to change at an even faster pace.
However, what we also discovered at this meeting is that we are
anchored by an enduring and universal set of values which champion
freedom of access to information for all. These values have earned us
the trust of individuals all over the world.
As our keynote speakers urged, we must adapt and renew. To quote
President Obama, we must be the change we want to see. So, at this
meeting we started down that path by doing what we do best, sharing

2. knowledge and insights and our own best practices. This call to action
produced a room full of thinkers and doers who added so much to the
discussions here.
These panels stimulated our thinking about the four components of the
change agenda for our libraries and our profession. I would like to talk
briefly about each and I will start with the change agenda for the
individual professionals. You may have heard me state before that first
is the personal level. What skills and competencies do we need to
continue to be successful in the 21st century? Librarians must embrace
continuous individual learning to keep their skills up to date and
relevant. We must let go of old ways of doing things, no matter how
comfortable we find them. But the personal competencies agenda
means change for library education as well. What do our library
educators need to do to insure they are providing our libraries and
other organizations with professionals who are equipped to provide the
transformational services that will keep our libraries and profession
strong? We asked some very important questions here and we must
continue to pursue the answers and to try new ways of ensuring that
our schools are free to pursue innovation in the service of education.
The second level is institutional change which involves building the
change agenda for our organizations. What will our communities need?
What is the change agenda for libraries, archives and the organizations
they serve? Part of that change means also keeping in mind that
institutionalism is in decline. The Trend Report tells us that technology
has provided new ways for people to organize themselves and that has
implications for not only libraries but library associations as well.

3. We heard many answers to the questions around institutional change ,
especially during the panels and discussion around public libraries,
Revolution in On-line learning and the panel on Opportunities for the
Future. Judging by this meeting and my travels around the world it is
clear to me that there is no shortage of innovation in libraries. What is
an issue however is that not every library is aligning with the needs of
their community and not every library has a clear vision of what they
need to be in the future. I will come back to this issue in a few minutes.
The third and fourth levels are national and global policy levels. What
barriers exist for libraries that are preventing them from meeting the
needs of their communities? Intellectual property, trade agreements,
internet governance issues, and numerous other policies cannot be
allowed to stand in the way of our success. All politics though is local
and that includes the politics of libraries. Our global vision of the
successful library of the future must also include a vision of strong
national associations and a strong IFLA that can advocate effectively so
that policy barriers can be overcome. At the global level, IFLA
successfully advocated for universal literacy and access to information
to be included in the sustainable development goals for 2030. Now
every country must produce a development plan to meet these goals
and libraries have been positioned for a seat at the table. However,
libraries and our profession must be ready with a clear picture of the
future we want. As part of this we heard from Stuart Hamilton about
the need to define a long term sustainable information environment to
support information policy advocacy at both the global and national
levels. A sustainable information environment needs to provide
solutions to the problems that cause inequities such as cost of

4. resources, long term digital preservation, and barriers to accessing
public information.
What we learned here in the last two days is that there is a lot of
excellent work going on right now to adapt and renew our libraries and
our profession. However, I am afraid we have been preaching to the
choir meaning all of you who are here have already seen the need to
build transformative services for your libraries, schools and advocacy
programs. You are here sharing your success stories and networking so
that future innovations can easily be replicated by others. This is all
very laudable and is an excellent response to the societal changes that
offer many challenges and opportunities to libraries. I would ask you
though, about libraries not represented here. Think about the
communities that are being left behind because their libraries are not
engaged in building transformative services. I would ask you how does
our good work supporting the institutional change agenda get
distributed to the broader library community that is beyond the walls of
the Sheraton Hotel in Toronto Canada.
To have real impact, what went on here must become a movement.
Ralph Turner in his Britannica article on social movements defines a
Social movement, as a loosely organized but sustained campaign in
support of a social goal, typically either the implementation or the
prevention of a change in society’s structure or values. Although social
movements differ in size, they are all essentially collective. That is, they
result from the more or less spontaneous coming together of people
whose relationships are not defined by rules and procedures but who
merely share a common outlook on society.

5. That is what I see in front of me as I look out over this audience. I see a
loosely organized group of people who share the outlook that libraries
continue to be very important to society because libraries can change
people’s lives. I see people who are capable of creating and
implementing the change they want rather than have the changes of
others imposed on them. I know that because I saw the fruits of your
work reflected in the panels and the discussions. I see a collective that
could exercise power to transform library services in libraries
worldwide. I think you have the power to inspire and empower others
to do what you are doing but it is up to you to determine the how and
to take the innovations and creativity that you share here to the next
step and IFLA is ready to help to do that.
This will require, knowing that you are part of a larger movement,
aligning with organizations that share the same goals and taking a more
disciplined and high impact approach to helping other libraries and
librarians ensure that their libraries are aligned with the goals of their
community, are recognized as engines of development and are funded
as key community assets.
I am happy to say that I saw action at this meeting and a commitment
to creating positive change. By working together we will create that
vision of the future where every library is an excellent library that
meets the needs of its community and where every librarian takes joy
in knowing that every day they contribute to changing people’s lives for
the better.
Thank you so much for all that you have done the last two days and I
am so looking forward to continuing to work with you all on achieving
this important goal.