This year, IFLA will finalise its next Strategy. Following five surveys of our members and volunteers, we’re now proud to share a first full draft, as approved for sharing by the Governing Board. Now it’s over to you – let us know what you think by 11 June!

IFLA’s Strategy not only provides a structure and direction for the work of IFLA’s volunteer units and headquarters, but also has a key role as a way of explaining our Federation and its mission, as well as providing a reference point and inspiration for others.

In preparing our 2019-2024 Strategy, IFLA drew on the inputs behind our Global Vision – over 32 000 in total – allowing us to understand better our field’s strengths and priorities, and what we could do to support it.

This Strategy comes to an end this year, and we are busy developing a successor. In doing this, we need to draw on the experience of the past five years, check our assumptions and ideas, and make sure that we are producing a text that is as useful as possible for our Federation and field.

This process started in October 2023, with a series of four pulse surveys (results here) looking at what people felt about our current strategy and how they had used it, how relevant the ten highlights and opportunities of the Global Vision are, and what IFLA you wanted to see in 2024. On this basis, the Governing Board defined ten ‘change pathways’, which were again shared for your views (results here).

What this told us was that you wanted a Strategy that was much clearer about explaining how our actions support the vision we have, that was easily adoptable and adaptable by all, and that made clear libraries’ contributions to development in particular.

At its meetings on 15-17 April, the Governing Board therefore approved a draft which, in particular, looks to:

  • make a stronger connection between the work of libraries and wider sustainable futures
  • be much clearer about how we think this can be achieved by libraries in general, and the role that IFLA can play in doing this
  • set out a simpler set of areas of action where everyone can potentially make a contribution

It also includes a fuller explanation of IFLA’s overall role and how the Strategy can be used, a one-page overview, and four further pages which offer more detail. It would be complemented by annual plans which talk more concretely about areas of work, and allow us to respond to change in the world around us, as well as a dashboard of indicators to allow us to monitor progress.

Access the draft Strategy on our Repository, in:

We are therefore now asking for your inputs via a new survey, which will be open until 11 June 2024. Through this, we want to understand how well the draft meets your needs, and to hear your suggestions for how we can improve it.

* Automated translations. All others are original or produced by IFLA language centres