The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and
Information Professionals in Scotland

International
networking

Colleagues overseas

Margaret Forrest reports on an IFLA Section meeting in Paris.

The grassroots of the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA)
are made up by its ‘Sections’ which, like the Special Interest Groups of CILIP,
cover a wide range of professional interests. One such group is the Libraries
Serving Disadvantaged Persons (LSDP) Section which is concerned with the provision
of accessible and inclusive library services to people with disabilities, patients
in hospitals and prisoners.

I recently attended the mid-year meeting of the LSDP Standing Committee (SC)
in Paris at which the group prepared the programme for the LSDP session at the
forthcoming Quebec conference, discussed a number of publication projects of
the Section and explored a couple of libraries.

Ten countries were represented by the 17 members, includingCroatia, France,
Japan, Korea, the Scandinavian countries, Scotland, South Africa and the US.
An important responsibility of the SC is to help prepare for the annual IFLA
conference, but we also spent time discussing our Section’s recent publications,[1]
making arrangements for translations of these to be made available on IFLA
Net and planning future projects for the Section.

Our two-day meeting was held in the Pompidou Centre and our French hosts had
arranged tours of the Public Reference Library at the Centre and a visit to
the library of the oldest hospital in Paris at Saint Louis.

The Public Reference Library at the Pompidou Centre (Bibliotheque publique
d’information (Bpi)) is a publicly-funded resource which is highly valued by
the people of Paris and beyond. It is one of the few reference libraries in
the city which is open at weekends