UAE literature industry luminaries attend IFLA World Library and Information

The UAE shared its expertise in publishing on the international stage during the recent visit of a delegation of senior figures from the literary world to the IFLA World Library and Information Congress in Poland.

The conference hosted in Wroclaw the largest city in western Poland was aimed at enabling the representatives to exchange experiences with their peers and to gain new insights into the latest developments in the field of libraries and archiving.

The Sharjah delegation comprising Rashid Al Kous, Executive Director of the Emirates Publishers Association, EPA, and Noura Binhadyia, Manager of Knowledge without Borders, KwB, visited the week-long event to participate in a series of workshops and seminars, as well as to network with their contemporaries and discuss areas of potential co-operation that could advance the arena of publishing for mutual benefit.

"Our attendance at the IFLA World Library and Information Congress was an invaluable opportunity to find out about the latest challenges and opportunities being identified in the global library field. In addition to gaining extremely important insights, we were able to establish new contacts who could help us extend our sphere of influence across borders and into new markets," Al Kous said.

Sessions titled ‘Burning Issues and Emerging Challenges in Copyright,’ Storytelling for Libraries’ and Understanding your Library from the Inside Out,’ were included in the congress programme. One workshop detailed how libraries were reaching out to people with autism, while another focussed on how participants could become agents of change in a rapidly evolving world.

The main aspect of the conference was how to bridge the gap between schools and libraries, with the best practices in this realm highlighted by representatives from international educational establishments including University of Toronto, University of North Texas, Peking University and Finland College.

"The main part of what KwB aspires to do is to use knowledge and culture to transcend borders and this visit has helped us bring our agenda to a new audience and to disseminate the KwB message further afield. It was an extremely rewarding and reciprocal activity, as we have been able to see how other entities arrange their library services and share with them KwB’s recent experience of successfully setting up 42,366 free home libraries across Sharjah," Binhadyia said.