Report on the IFLA Conference held in Glasgow, 16-23 August

Citation

McGrath, M. (2002), "Report on the IFLA Conference held in Glasgow, 16-23 August", Interlending & Document Supply, Vol. 30 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ilds.2002.12230dac.002

Report on the IFLA Conference held in Glasgow, 16-23 August

Keywords: Professional associations, Conference, Libraries

Introduction

I am a veteran of numerous conferences – including 18 annual conferences of my trade union, when staying up all night arguing and drinking and going straight into the conference the next morning was considered normal in the heady days of the 1960s. However, my first IFLA conference exceeded all of them in its complexity and size. A total of 4,700 delegates from 122 countries attended workshops, open sessions, plenaries, standing committees, receptions and speeches. The organisation seemed faultless, at least to this delegate's eyes. A fine example of Scottish efficiency, and Glasgow in particular. An echo from the efficiency of another age was visible through the windows of the exhibition centre; a vast shipbuilding crane, the cabin of which could have housed 100 workmen. This was "Red Clydeside", which in earlier times employed some of the most militant workers in the world and which has now been theme parked out of existence. Well, that is progress.

Elsevier presentation

One of the conference highlights was a presentation from Derk Haanks, CEO of the publisher that librarians love to hate. Apparently "Derk" is the same as the English "Derek", but according to Haanks, the Dutch are as mean as the Scottish as far as letters go; although I do not know how he explains the double a in "Haanks". Still, you do not get to be CEO of Elsevier without having an answer for everything. He outlined his strategy for the future to an audience of 250 delegates. "The future is here" he declaimed, "we are further down the road than people might think". He gave a not so gentle dig at all the soothsayers who have been saying for years that we cannot predict how the IT revolution will develop. Elsevier is there and the future is 24/7 access to all titles from Vol. 1 No. 1 electronically straight to the end user – if you can afford to pay. "Even Elsevier people are human" he quipped, fearing for their jobs when Elsevier embarked on this strategy four years ago. He defended vigorously the journal model but saw the business model driving expansion into new sectors with a large number of smaller customers. That way "more people will pay less". He showed a neat graph which indicated that Elsevier has been raising prices by 8 per cent a year, which is lower than the increases of 11 of its closest competitors. Another graph showed that Elsevier was superior to other competitors on all customer satisfaction indicators. Although impressive – especially as we have run a similar monitoring exercise at BLDSC for many years, Elsevier's reputation has been so bad that I do not know if the audience was convinced by a couple of pretty graphs. However, they are now much more flexible and have responded to criticisms by allowing customers to purchase by article, by single title, by bundle and by the whole list.

He professed a lack of personal enthusiasm for archiving but went on to announce an agreement with the Royal Library in The Netherlands whereby Elsevier's complete backfile will be archived electronically and the Royal Library will provide a back up service if Elsevier ceased to do so for whatever reason.

A total of 75 per cent of their customers have already switched to a deal which provides all the electronic content for roughly the same price as they had previously been paying. In three years they expect 50 per cent of their customers to be 'e only' although now it is only 10 per cent and a few years ago was only a "handful of freaks". He assured the audience that they would continue print for the indefinite future. The archive now is four times bigger than in 2002, which itself was four times bigger than in 2000. It now contains 2.5 million articles with a 4 million article backfile.

He observed, I thought rather naively, that Elsevier did not want to dominate the world, that it was happy with its position; their recent takeover of Harcourt and now of US medical publisher Hanley and Belfus suggests that his modesty is overplayed.

However, all in all, an impressive performance. Only time and the sales figures will tell if customers are won over.

Standing Committee for ILL-DD

I attended the Standing Committee (SC) for Interlending and Document Delivery (ILL-DD) at 08.30 on Saturday (who says that delegates are not dedicated) and again on the following Friday, chaired by the formidable Mary Jackson. As its name suggests, it is responsible for managing the affairs of IFLA in this area of library activity. It has 187 members, making it the sixth largest section. Two matters which will be of particular interest to readers were discussed, the future of the IFLA voucher scheme and the ILDS conference.

The British Library has withdrawn support from the popular voucher scheme as a consequence of the decision to close the IFLA office at Boston Spa. However, Mary announced that IFLA has decided to continue to support the scheme and a new home will need to be found; a committee comprising herself, Derek Law (IFLA treasurer) and Ross Shimmon will decide the matter, preferably by March 2003.

The popular ILDS conference, held every two years, has been supported by the Boston Spa IFLA office in an ad hoc fashion and the section agreed to take responsibility in future. This will involve deciding on the host country and offering help to organise the conference. Preparations are in hand for the 2003 conference, being held in Canberra, Australia, in October 2003 (see the announcement elsewhere in this issue).

Four sub committees were proposed and agreed – Principles and Guidelines, The Newsletter, Strategy and Conference Organising Committee.

The latter committee met during the conference and recommended that the theme for IFLA 2003, in Berlin, should be "Centralisation and decentralisation", which would span the whole process of record creation through to document delivery.

The open session, on Wednesday, was well attended, at which four papers were delivered. Daniel Mattes, on co-operation, which was comprehensive if a little basic for a conference of experienced librarians. Two papers were given on the document delivery project between Denmark and Ghana; the two differing perspectives, the Danish critical and the Ghanaians enthusiastic, provided a useful insight into how partners can develop different perspectives.

A paper on "The international network for the availability of scientific publications" (INAS) was presented by a stand-in, at short notice, who had also only worked at INASP for a few months! She made an excellent presentation on an excellent organisation which aims to deliver heavily discounted or free content to developing countries from developed world publishers. Unfortunately, the speakers from India were unable to be present in order to give their paper on "Enhancing access to information through document delivery systems". However, all the papers are available from the IFLANET site on free download.

I attended a number of other sessions including the Round Table for editors of LIS journals. A number of excellent papers were given including two which indicated the readership of LIS journals – the large majority reading or browsing no more than five a month, although in one study this rose to 13 when prompted by specific title; the conflicting figures highlight the difficulty of obtaining useful information unless a questionnaire is carefully constructed, as it was in this case.

All in all a busy and very useful conference, not the least for that invaluable activity of networking.

Mike McGrath