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This report aims to summarize selected presentations of the International Federations of Librarians Associations and Institutions (IFLA) 79th world congress held at Suntec City centre, Singapore, and highlight Asian participation in the World Library and Information Congress (WLIC) 2013. In addition to its content, the IFLA congress provides opportunities to discuss emerging issues and best practices with colleagues, vendors, and consultants across the globe.

Reports from the viewpoint of an IFLA 2013 congress participant and paper presenter; presents an overview of the selected events with more detail on some of the presented papers and Continuing Professional Development and Workplace Learning (CPDWL) workshop. IFLA congress attracts librarians from all sectors and work environments from around the globe. It is difficult to document the entire conference happenings in a single report because of its huge and diverse nature; therefore a selective approach is used.

The WLIC in Singapore was one of the most exciting social and professional events of the year. Over the years, the author finds that IFLA congresses deliver the best value in professional development; the educational value of the IFLA congress that author has had attended is consistent and cost-beneficial.

It is not possible for any one person to cover all aspects of IFLA; it contains presentation summary of selected papers maybe of particular interest to readers who missed these sessions.

The Singapore congress was worthwhile and enlightening, revealing the diversity of current developments in library service delivery worldwide. This report summarizes information about the congress useful for professionals who did not attend.

In Hawaiʻi, two public library systems exist – a traditional municipal branch system and a Native Hawaiian rural community-based library network. The Hawaii State Public Library System (HSPLS) is the traditional municipal library system that services the state’s diverse communities with 51 branch locations, plus its federal repository, the Hawaii State Library for the Blind and Print Disabled. The HSPLS primarily serves the local urban communities of Hawaiʻi, diverse in its citizenry. The Native Hawaiian Library, a unit of ALU LIKE, Inc. (a Hawaiian non-profit social services organization), boasts multiple locations across six inhabited Hawaiian Islands, primarily serving rural Hawaiian communities. The HSPLS focuses on traditional public library services offered by MLS-degreed librarians. In contrast, the Native Hawaiian Library (ALU LIKE) focuses on culturally oriented literacy services offered by Hawaiian cultural practitioners. As the state’s only library and information sciences (LISs) educational venue, the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s LIS program (UHM LIS) is a nexus point between these two library systems where LIS students learn the value of community-based library services while gaining the traditional technical skills of librarianship concerning Hawaiʻi as a place of learning and praxis.

This book chapter focuses on outcomes from the IMLS-funded research project called “Hui ʻEkolu,” which means “three groups” in the Hawaiian language. From 2018 to 2021, the HSPLS, the Native Hawaiian Library (ALU LIKE), and the UHM LIS Program gathered as “Hui ʻEkolu” to create a community of praxis to share and exchange knowledge to learn from one another to improve professional practice and heighten cultural competency within a Hawaiian context. Native Hawaiian values were leveraged as a nexus point for the three groups to connect and build relationships for sustainable mentorship and culturally competent connections as a model for librarian professional development. The result is a model for collective praxis that leverages local and endemic cultural values for sustainable collaborative professional development for public librarianship.

This chapter introduces the construct of “white pricks” defined as vaccines of moral awakenings to inoculate against racialized trauma in a white-centered majority in library and information science (LIS) education and challenge its hegemonic power, privilege, and oppressions. In keeping with the theme of the book, one male “voice” of color from the margins of a predominantly white-female majority provides a strategic approach to operationalize social justice toward antiracist praxis and decenter white privilege in a professional association’s leadership networks of LIS educators. The narrative also highlights ways to integrate the American Library Association’s ninth principle recently included in its Code of Ethics beyond “lip-service” via social justice actions to change imbalanced power dynamics and discard systemic enactment of dysfunctional behaviors, practices, and policies.

The imperative role of cataloguing in libraries as the bedrock of information/knowledge organization, the need to manage and retain knowledge for strategic planning and better knowledge management (KM) frameworks, little or no information sharing in cataloguing units in federal university libraries in Nigeria, gave rise to this study. The purpose of this study is to identify knowledge sharing (KS) norms and factors that challenge KS practices among cataloguers to provide positive perspective and approach to KS in cataloguing sections of university libraries and improve KM frameworks for better service delivery.

Based on a qualitative survey design, this study examined KS norms, practices and challenges of cataloguers in five university libraries in south-west Nigeria. Data were collected through an open interview to gather in-depth information from 45 cataloguers. Given the small number of the cataloguing team in each library, an enlisting of all cataloguers (census survey) was pertinent for the study. Data collected were analyzed thematically, interviews transcribed and similar responses grouped to provide answers to research questions.

This study revealed KS norms to be somewhat inconsistent and informal than formal, though participants identified the crucial need for KS in their departments. Factors identified as challenges to KS: mood and pressure from work, participants seeing KS as a waste of time, the “know-it-all” attitude, tribal differences, lack of financial motivation, no formal training and mentoring programme, willingness to learn and copy cataloguing.

This study not only improves the dearth of literature on the issue of KS among cataloguers in Nigerian university libraries; but also provides definite perspective and approach to KS in university libraries' cataloguing section to improve KM frameworks for better service delivery.

The recent spate of eminence received by the MOOCs (massive open online courses) from media to academia is revolutionary in higher education. MOOCs are a disruptive technological innovation which offers open learning with the aid of the internet and delivered by the faculty of reputed institutions, globally. Since Coursera being one such significant platform, its exploration would display the broader picture of MOOCs. As a result, studying it from various dynamics has been the motive of the current endeavour.

The quantitative study of the collected data was applied with help of descriptive research methodology to measure the contribution of the top six countries namely US, China, Japan, Germany, India and UK. All these six countries were selected on the basis of GDP (harvested from official website World Bank – data.worldbank.org/ to Coursera––an online platform providing MOOCs. The involvement of these selected countries was gauged (from the official website of Coursera https://www.coursera.org/) in terms of number, type of contributing institutions, number of courses offered by those institutions, type of courses offered, number of instructors and instructor gender ratio.

The findings reveal that the United States (US) is the top contributor in terms of partner institutes (97), courses (Specialization courses – 1,267 and degree courses– 40) and number of instructors (1,290). Interestingly, it was also observed that universities are the major contributor institutes in all six studied countries. Most of the institutes provide specialization courses while a very few provide degree courses. A large number of instructors are involved for imparting these courses online. Instructor gender ratio on average is 2:1 (male: female). It was also observed that there is usually a specific common time of starting courses on Coursera.

Online platforms are the main delivery points for MOOCs; therefore, vibrancy and articulacy of such platforms make this innovation a success, and examining such a platform which exhibits such characteristics would present an overall picture of its functionality, development, evolution and future expansion of the innovation (MOOCs).

The aim of this study is to use the guiding strategy, Melbourneâ™’s Scholarly Information Future, which is a ten-year strategy that identifies in its aspirations the importance of building effective access to the rich cultural, scholarly and research collections of the University of Melbourne and acknowledges the critical role that digitization plays in achieving this vision. The University of Melbourne has a rich, complex and ultimately voluminous array of cultural, scholarly and research material that is of great interest and value to the its community, scholarly researchers and the global community. Since the strategy endorsement in 2008, the authors have progressively moved from a digitization environment that was uncoordinated, ad hoc and lacked centralized expertise that led to a proliferation of isolated, under-resourced areas producing inconsistent and indifferent quality images to our goal of an exemplar digitization framework, program and enterprise capability for the University to leverage.

Case study of the journey taken by the University of Melbourne in building an enterprise digitization capability.

This article outlines the journey and the approach in building this capability in a challenging economic environment, the engagement strategies to gain support and funding, skills and equipment and the unique challenges of the digitization of a diverse array of University collections. Second, it also explores digitization as transformation and outlines some of the infinite and extraordinary possibilities created from digitized content of library collections.

This article will be of value to institutions that are considering taking similar steps.

The study aims to discuss the special needs-centric information delivery as a new genre of the academic library services. It also sheds light on the assistive technology used to help blind or visually impaired (BVI) students to access the available digital contents and use online services conveniently. A particular emphasis placed on gaining some insights into BVIs’ perceptions towards the orientation and assistance offered by the access service librarians, as well as any experience in using assistive educational technology for reading and information access.

The authors used semi-structured interview survey to gather the necessary data from 35 BVI university students drawn from the Special Needs Services (SNS) Unit at the UAE University. The interview was concerned with use of library e-resources and online services for doing their assignments, easy-to-use facilities to access the e-resources and main challenges facing them in communicating with the librarians.

The findings revealed that the BVI students considered that the university library does not answer their needs for getting access to digital content and using online services adequately.

The Main Library should cooperate closely with the SNS Unit to get the most benefits from their experience in the BVI-devoted services to develop an efficient library information discovery and delivery to this student group.

There is scarcity of scholarly studies on the pedagogical and information acquisition challenges facing the BVI university students in the UAE higher education. This is the first research study that tackles the experience of the BVI students in using the academic library.