Kick-off and Regional Workshops 

The IFLA Global Vision discussion kicked off in spectacular style in April at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center Lighthouse building in Athens, Greece.

With the torch lit, Global Vision travelled around the world with a series of high-level meetings involving participants from 140 countries who engaged in the discussions held in Washington D.C., Yaoundé, Alexandria, Buenos Aires, Singapore and Madrid. The workshops focused on how to strengthen the ties within the library field, helped identify future challenges and opportunities for the library field, and prioritise actions that the library environment could take in response to the fast-pacing changes in societies. 

IFLA Global Vision 2017 Kick off participants Learn more about the Global Vision kick-off and regional workshops organised by IFLA:

 

IFLA Global Vision 2017 Roadmap​

IFLA Professional Units and beyond

Numerous meetings and online threads under #iflaGlobalVision led by librarians from all over the world—with active participation of library associations—built on the momentum started in Athens. The meetings followed a similar format and were focused on a set of questions designed through a collaborative process, e.g. What are libraries exceptionally good at? What are the main challenges to libraries? What would be the characteristics of a united library field? See the reports from meetings organised by IFLA Units and Sections.

The participants of all meetings organised by IFLA were asked to facilitate their own workshops within their communities, countries and library networks. Also, a set of guidelines for librarians and library friends interested in organising their own, self-facilitated meetings were made available in 7 languages. From the kick-off meeting in Athens in Spring 2017, each workshop has contributed its own droplet into an ever-expanding river of ideas.

Voting

 

To make participation in the discussion even easier, an online voting platform was launched in August 2017 during IFLA’s World Library and Information Congress in Wrocław, Poland. The platform included the set of questions used in the regional and self-facilitated meetings and the survey answer options were based on the outcome of the regional meetings in six continents. The voting was completed on 16 October 2017. In total, we had received 22.000 votes from 190 out of 193 UN Member States.