Talk by Alex Byrne, IFLA President

Talk by Alex Byrne, IFLA President

I went to hear Alex Byrne, the current IFLA President, yesterday at UiTM and I was somewhat disappointed with the talk. My fault actually as I was expecting a different thing from him. There were three parts to his talk, first was on IFLA and its activities. Second, was on World Summit of Information Society (WSIS) and the third on digital library. Although all of them are valid and still relevant but there isn’t anything that really new that he was talking about. I was expecting new thinking, direction and initiatives maybe. I guess in the world of librarianship past issues are still current issues. Again this doesn’t mean the world of librarianship is way behind in thinking and progress it is just that the issues are just still relevant no matter what the era or environment. I guess that is why I saw not many ‘excited’ and ‘interested’ people there. I guess that is why there are quite a number of escaped librarians like me ())) Indeed most of my batch mates are now escaped librarians. All was not lost for me as I got to meet old friends that I have not a chance to meet. I got to know, at least comforting to my ego, that quite a number of my former students are lecturers now. Some of them are leading quite interesting interest groups like CI.

As planned I met my old buddy ARM and meeting him means a blast. Even though it was a short meeting we never have had such a good laugh for a long time