Environmental Sustainability and Libraries Special Interest Group

The ENSULIB SIG invites information professionals involved or interested in sustainability to send proposals to be selected for presentations at the SIG's Open Session during the World Library and Information Congress in San Juan, Puerto Rico, 13-18 August 2011.

Scope of the Session:

• Papers are expected to cover a range of topics related to sustainability and libraries – these may encompass but are not limited to:
• Innovations in library buildings, operations, conservation practices, services, etc., that are sustainable.
• Innovations in access and accessibility to "green" information resources.
• Collection development, services, advocacy/outreach, programs, etc. focusing on sustainability and/or the environment, climate change / adaptation, clean energy or other green technologies, green living, etc.
• Education / training or awareness building of information professionals on topics related to sustainability, “green” best practices, climate change, etc.
• Networks related to sustainability.

Proposals:

Should be in English, with optionally an attached version in French or Spanish, and include:

• Title of the paper
• A detailed abstract of the paper (no more than 500 words), if possible accompanied by some references such as URLs and bibliographies.
• Speaker's name, address, telephone and fax numbers, professional affiliation, email address and brief biographical statement of no more than 50 words.

Email proposals to Veerle Minner Van Neygen or Vincent Bonnet no later than March 3, 2011 and indicate “IFLA proposal” in the subject line.

Proposals will be reviewed by a team of active members of the Environmental Sustainability and Libraries SIG and eventually of the Standing Committee of the P&C section.

Successful proposals will be identified and presenters notified by March 15, 2011.

Main selection criteria:

• Relevance to the SIG's mission, objectives and it's theme for this year.
• Compatibility with the Conference theme.
• Interest /usefulness of topic.
• Specificity and concreteness.
• Clearness of text.
• Fairness/balance in countries representation.
• Other outstanding characteristics of the paper.
• Cases of practical experiences, research results with practical applications will be preferred, all other considerations being equal.
• For research papers, soundness of methodology will be taken into account.

Final Papers:

Papers must not have been published nor submitted for publication elsewhere.  Hopefully, this year, simultaneous interpretation will be available for the SIG's open session. However, as this particular is not yet fully confirmed, authors should be prepared to deliver their presentation in English. Authors whose first language is not English should not be inhibited from submitting contributions in English because of this; every possible effort will be made to provide for the correction of minor linguistic errors in English.

The final document should preferably be presented as a paper (that may be published on the IFLA website and as an option in the IFLA Journal). The accompanying abstract should be shorter (no more than 150 words) that the abstract of the proposal.  As accepted papers eventually might become candidates for publication in IFLA Journal, it is highly recommended that authors follow the Journal’s and Sage’s guidelines and recommendations concerning format and bibliographic references.

Presenters will be expected to submit the final versions of their papers (no longer than 10 pages) by May 21, 2011. Papers should be in one of the official IFLA languages (English, Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Russian or Spanish), and authors are kindly requested to attach a version in English when the original is in another language, as written translation services are not always available for SIGs.

Authors will have 15 minutes at the programme to deliver their presentation, and after that, time will be devoted to a Q&A and debate session.

Important dates:

March 3, 2011: Deadline for submission of abstract
March 15, 2011: Notification of acceptance/rejection
May 21, 2011: Deadline for submission of text.
June 21, 2011: Deadline for submission of translations.