First page of interview with Glòria Pérez-Salmerón​IFLA President Glòria Pérez-Salmerón has placed realising the potential of libraries to empower their users in a digital society, and so achieve development goals, at the heart of her mandate. In an interview with French magazine Livres Hebdo, she set out her vision and priorities.

Speaking with journalist Véronique Heurtematte in the margins of a meeting of new and future librarians in Paris and Lyon, she underlined that our increasingly digital society makes the role of libraries more important. Faced with growing amounts of information, people need the skills and tools to process and apply it effectively. LIbraries can help.

To facilitate this, legal change – in particular copyright reform – is necessary. But so too is a change of mindset, both among decision-makers and among librarians themselves. Progress is beginning to be made, she underlined, but through the developing its global vision through a unique consultative process, IFLA is laying the road to more ambitious progress in the years ahead. 

The original article, in French, is available to download here. An unofficial translation into English is available here.