There is only the closing session left. This is where the awards and prizes are announced. We already know (now) that the 2010 conference will be in Gothenburg but we haven’t had the flashy video before because it wasn’t in the frame in previous years. So we have a flashy video, finishing with Abba’s ‘Take a Chance on Me’. We have another flashy video for San Juan, Puerto Rico in 2011. The region is announced from which the venue for 2013 will be selected: in a gesture of reassurance after its bruising about Brisbane, the chosen region is South-East Asia and Oceania. Then the announcement for 2012. We already knew it was to be Europe (hence candidate city Gothenburg’s ability to step into the breach for 2010) and the winner now announced is Helsinki. Cue yet another flashy video. Never mind Eurocentrism, this is Scandocentrism! 2005 Oslo, 2010 Gothenburg, 2013 Helsinki. (If global warming continues, we can probably look forward to Spitzbergen in 2017…)
Mauro Guerrini, chair of the Italian National Committee, gives the final figures: 3,931 delegate registrations, 128 exhibitors; when all the interpreters, volunteers, IFLA staff etc are added in the grand total of attenders is 4,496 – an impressive achievement in the light of the recession.
Bob McKee gives the vote of thanks – in Italian, with an extended analogy between the IFLA conference and Milan’s other great passion, football. I think I understood almost every word, although Bob assures me that that was because it was more like Itanglish (my Italian friends demur).
It’s time for Claudia Lux to hand the President’s gavel over to Ellen Tise of South Africa, who gives her opening address on her Presidential theme – ‘Libraries driving access to knowledge’. Unfortunately the wifi has failed again in the conference centre and I get back to the hotel too late to make it worth purchasing internet time there, so you’re getting access to this particular bit of knowledge (well, information) the next morning.
The last reception of the conference is to thank the departing General Board and is held in the 18th-century Braidense Library, which is a regional legal deposit library fo Lombardy. Dinner with Jesus Lau of Mexico and Anna Maria Tammaro of Italy, then at long last I get to ride on a No 19, one of Milan’s oldest set of trams with wonderful polished wooden seats.
Braidense Library
Anna Maria Tammaro, Jesus Lau, and me
The No 19 tram
September 9, 2009 at 7:18 am |
Dear Mr Heaney,
Many thanks for the pictures of our Library and of ourselves. Our Director, Mr Aurelio Aghemo, is the gentleman in black to the right, I am the lady in black next to the lady in red.
It is a great honour for us to have met you, and we hope to meet you again in the near future.
If you have any queries on the library and its collections, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Kindest regards. Dr. Paola Ferro