IFLA Lyon : WLIC is that?

No, I'm not swearing, I promise! The World Library and Information Congress (WLIC) is IFLA's annual conference and the most well-known and of its activities. But IFLA, it's also numerous sections and divisions and strategic programmes and special interest groups... For them, the congress is the opportunity to hold committee meetings and to present their findings and activities, simply because there are so many people attending! And for those who may feel a bit lost in the crowd, there are things like the caucuses and the Newcomers' session.

CLM Standing Committee meeting

Most of the groups tend to hold one committee meeting before the start of the congress and one during it. To attend, it's easy: *all* you need to do is walk up to the chair of the group and ask for permission.

I chose to go (you're not going to be surprised here) to the Copyright and other Legal Matters (CLM) meeting on 16 August, and it was probably the most intimidating thing I did during the congress! But before I continue let me dissipate a misconception: Standing Committees don't hold their meetings while standing up - I checked, they all had chairs. They even had chairs for observers like me actually. There was one other observer in the room: a lady who seemed to know everyone and had been to many IFLA WLIC before. She wasn't very talkative but was still a handy person to be sitting next to when you're not sure of the procedure!

This committee is composed of these very experienced-looking people (and I don't mean old, I mean confident and obviously knowledgeable; a lot of them heads of libraries) but also affable:

And, just like at any normal committee meeting, they reported on the group's activity (e.g. participation in WIPO talks) and news, commented on CLM issues affecting libraries, discussed actions and future plans (for example suggestion for topics for WLIC 2015 sessions)...

They even had a mini impromptu debate on the "right to be forgotten"! It was very interesting to see how the issue was perceived by people of different nationalities, depending on the personal data laws and perception of privacy in their country. Paul Whitney brilliantly summed up the "right to be forgotten" by saying it is "akin to requiring a library to withdraw a catalogue record but not the actual item from the collections".

UK caucus

A caucus is for those who feel a tad concussed (see what I did there?) by all this internationalism and need a bit of reassurance that they also have peers from the same country / language / region in the place. Basically it's a gathering of people.

I went to the UK caucus as I feel more of a "UK librarian" than a "French-speaking librarian" (most of my fellow French volunteers went to the caucus for French-speaking participants) and I do not regret it at all! I think it was the best: instead of being all formal sitting in rows in a room, everyone stayed standing and chatting in the corridor (maybe because that's where the wine and canapés were? Huh.) The speeches lasted no more five minutes each: there was a welcome from CILIP President Barbara Band, from IFLA President-Elect Donna Scheeder and from the CFIBD (French international committee for libraries and information services) President Pascal Sanz.

Newcomers' session

Still on the same line of trying to make participants feel less overwhelmed by the whole thing is the newcomers' session . It took place on the Sunday morning before the official opening ceremony. The panel was chaired by Barbara Lison, a member of IFLA's Governing Board, who welcomed six different "IFLA people" and asked them to talk about their first WLIC, what coming to the conference can bring to an attendee, plus their tips for first-timers. Here are some of my favourites:

• When asked: "How do you become an IFLA President?", Ellen Tise (IFLA President 2009-2011) replied: "Take pictures of yourself with the current IFLA President!" On a more serious note, she gave the best advice for anyone at a conference: "Don't stay with people from your own country; go and sit next to someone you don't know in a session and introduce yourself" because you are there to meet and learn from others.
• Ian Yap (Manager for the IFLA Regional Office Asia and Oceania) said that an IFLA conference makes you realise that everyone is facing the same issues. To make the best of WLIC, listen to other's ideas and contribute to the discussion.
• Jérémy Lachal (IFLA International Leaders Associate) : "IFLA is one of the best antidepressant in the world - it makes you realise that you are not alone."
• Kent Skov Andreasen (IFLA Governing Board member) said that people who chose to come to IFLA WLIC were open-minded, curious and confused - between so many sessions! You need to take the inspiration and ideas gained from coming to the conference and do something with them.

IFLA Lyon : the volunteer experience

From 15th to 22nd August I was lucky enough to attend the 80th IFLA World Library and Information Congress in France. The poor inhabitants of Lyon saw 4,000 librarians invade their city for a full week - but they were pre-warned: there were signs everywhere!

How did I manage to get myself there? Simple: I applied to be a volunteer and was selected (ok, for that to happen, I have to admit that being bilingual French-English was a great help) That meant that in exchange for helping out four half-days I could go to the rest of the congress for free! Brilliant.

Being a volunteer obviously means attending training (in my case watching the videos and reading up) before the conference and having duties once you're there: arriving a day earlier for the last instructions, being on time for your shifts even if they start at 7am, staying at your post for several hours at a time... But it also meant being part of a big family of people wearing sky-blue gilets (congress participants affectionately nicknamed us "the Smurfs"!) - a family of almost 300 people, a third of whom were staying in the same student residence, a very sociable family whose members organised two very well-attended tours of Lyon or suggested a different bar to meet in every night.

It was the second time I attended a conference as a volunteer (the first time being the ABF congress in 2012) and I would definitely recommend it. Not only is it a very affordable way to participate in an event of this scale, but being part of such a group makes it more friendly and less intimidating - even if you go without knowing anyone it won't last for long!

original picture: CC-BY-SA Guillaume Gast

So yes, there was a good atmosphere at IFLA Lyon; I talked to librarians from France, the UK, Italy, Romania, Canada, the USA, Malaysia, two different central-African countries (but unfortunately I can't remember which ones), Australia, Brazil... People were generally happy to be there and to answer questions about libraries in their countries.

The Lyon Tourist Office also helped make it a great experience: all congress attendees had free travel on public transport and free entry to most city-centre museums (though personally, the only building I visited was... the hospital's dental emergencies service. Never mind!)

In the next few posts I will tell you about:

• what I learnt about IFLA through attending a standing committee meeting, a caucus and the newcomers' session;
• the little things that struck me from all the different sessions I attended;
• and hopefully, tell you about a debate I attended which led me to propose a session on a similar topic at Library Camp UK 2014.

Copyright Masterclass

On 11th June I attended the ASLIB "Copyright Masterclass" led by Naomi Korn. Here are some titbits from my notes with some added explanations of my own.

The law is "late"
There is a discrepancy between what we want to do (usage) and what we are allowed to do. We use licences for cases where the law does not go far enough.
As the UK Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) puts it: "If the material you wish to reproduce does not fall within one of the [copyright] exceptions, or if you are unsure, you should contact the copyright owner, or someone authorised by them to grant the necessary permission." A CLA licence will usually cover you for a wider use than the copyrights exceptions, because they provide a blanket licence where rights have been cleared for specific uses (the CLA is "someone authorised by the copyright holder to grant the necessary permission"). So before copying a work, check in this order: your CLA licence, your electronic licences, exceptions to copyright law.

Copyright duration and foreign works
When copying/using a work, you would ask yourself whether the work in question is covered by copyright, and if so, who is the copyright owner.
If the work is potentially covered by copyright (I'm not going to define this here - go see the details on the IPO website) then you need to determine whether it is STILL in copyright; if the copyright has expired it's in the public domain and you're alright to use it.

Beach promenade in Pondicherry
CC BY-SA Sanyam Bahga

So how do you know if a work is in the public domain? In most cases you will need to know either when it was published or when (if) the creator died. Let's take an example: a text. If the author is British then it's easy: copyright lasts 70 years after the end of the year in which the author died. That makes sense, right: UK copyright laws apply to British works. So what happens when the author lived and worked in... Pondicherry? In India copyright only lasts up to 60 years after the author died - if the copyright has expired in the author's country but would not have in the UK, can you still use it legally here? The answer is yes - when using copyrighted works from another country in the UK, you would apply UK copyright exceptions but the copyright duration from the country of origin (think about it - it makes sense). Or as the Europeana public domain calculator says: "The Rule of Shorter Term (Comparison of Terms) applies. This means that the term of protection is that established by the legislation of the selected country, unless (barring provisions to the contrary in the legislation of that country) the term fixed in the country of origin of the work is shorter. In such cases, the term of protection is that of the country of origin."

Ooh, yes there is a public domain calculator! Did I not mention it? Sorry... Temper your enthusiasm though: the Europeana calculator is a factual one, that asks you the right questions to guide you through the different copyright rules. If you want to just be able to enter the name of a work and get an (almost) yes or no answer, try the public domain calculator developed using metadata from the French National Library (beta version at: http://www.calculateurdomainepublic.fr/)

Orphan works risk management
You have established the work you want to use is still in copyright, or you have not been able to establish that it is definitely in the public domain. You now need to obtain permission from the copyright holder (if the use you want to make of the work is not covered by your CLA or other licence, or any copyright exceptions, as mentioned above). Finding a copyright holder is not as easy as it sounds, which is why a lot of works are actually "orphan works".

Oliver Twist at the orphanage
Illustration by James Mahoney (1810-1879)

Let's consider another example: you've found an image you want to use (e.g. on the Internet), it looks like it may still be under copyright, but you are not sure who the creator is. That's where you will need to do a bit of risk management. If you use this "orphan" image nevertheless... what are the chances of you getting caught? If you get caught, what will it cost you? Are you ready to face the reputational damage, not just to you personally but to your employer/organisation, linked with being sued for copyright infringement? Well, personally (my boss will be pleased to hear), I'm not.
To help you assess the risks, the JISC-funded Open Educational Resources IPR support project offers a risk management calculator. It gives you an indicative risk level for using orphan works, depending on what type of work you are dealing with, whether it was originally created for a commercial purpose, the licence under which you intend to offer it and how much of an effort you have made in tracing the copyright holder.

Happy calculating!

The bank adviser and the librarian

A few weeks ago I had to visit my financial adviser at my French bank. What could have been a 20-minutes appointment turned into a 55-minutes meeting, because we didn't discuss my financial situation only. I actually realised that my bank adviser and I were faced with - would you believe it! - similar issues and questions in our professional lives. Here are a few of them.

First, both a public library branch and a bank one are a customer-facing service; people come in wanting to carry out a specific task and sometimes seeking help (I can see you thinking: "Do they get the same awkward customers as we do?" My bank adviser did mention something about feeling patronised by some of his customers; I didn't push this topic as it wouldn't have been professional for him to complain about customers to me) My bank in France is actually a small branch with only two financial advisers and a receptionist; it's located right next to a big supermarket.

CC BY-NC-SA Devon Buchanan

Information literacy
In libraries we are keen on our "authoritative resources" - we recognise their necessity and promote them - but we also know full well that for a quick answer we might be better off using a good search engine or Wikipedia as a first port of call rather than delving into the right encyclopedia. When my bank adviser is looking for the definition of a term, he does the same! Except his next port of call, instead of the encyclopedia, are the documents on the bank's intranet.
While doing that, he also made a comment which I could sympathise with: "We've just changed our platform because we've had to move over to Windows 7, and not everything is quite working the way it should be"!

Marketing
"People don't know the range of services we offer - we don't only bank, we also offer insurance which is often very competitive but people don't think about it and go with the traditional insurance companies". Welcome to the club - people still mainly associate libraries with book-lending! This said, a bank and a public library service don't have quite the same resources to allocate to Communication... In a bank, it's not the branch that will do a huge marketing campaign, it's the head office and it will be nationwide. So in libraries, are we making the most of whatever nationwide publicity we can get, via every SCL and CILIP campaigns that grab the headlines, or for example participating in National Libraries Day?

CC BY-NC-SA Devon Buchanan

Self-service
I've seen ATMs long before I ever saw self-service machines in a library. As an adult, I've never been a customer of a bank that still kept cash behind the counter. Bank customers are used to using a machine to: withdraw money, deposit cash, check their account balance, deposit cheques, print bank statements... That's coming slowly for libraries. Of course, in both cases, there are still some staff around to help.
My bank adviser told me about a pilot of a full self-service bank - with no staff around. No receptionist; financial advisers only available by appointment. He was quite concerned about it; for several reasons. One being that just like in libraries, some bank customers aren't quite confident using the self-service and either need or prefer to have someone to help them. Another being: what happens to the receptionist - do they lose their job, have to move into a very different one?
Again, things that can be easily applied to libraries.