IFLA 2005, Oslo: Day 2

Skipped lunch after the standing committee meeting. Met with two other colleagues and decided to visit the Ski (pronounced as "Shee") Public Library before the Caucus Meeting in the evening.
The Ski Public Library is located in a shopping mall and is strategically located just next to the cinema ticketing booth. Great way to attract movie-goers who have time to spare before the start of their show.

This is the library entrance.


And this is what you'd see when you step in.

BTW, to the left of this picture (not shown here) is a small newspaper reading corner. This level houses the Children's section. An upper floor has the AV collection. To the right of this picture are stairs leading down to the lower floor where the Adult and Young People's collection are housed.



I liked how the building design provides a sort of cross-section view, where level 1 was flushed with the street while the basememt was below street level.



We spent only 10 minutes there. The visit was unplanned but we managed to have a quick word with one of the librarian on their collection and library usage.

I saw one self-checkout machine, 3 or 4 OPAC terminals, and perhaps 8 to 10 Internet terminals.

The library was not as crowded as what we would see for a Saturday crowd in a Singapore shopping mall library. I think there was not more than 20 library users when we were there. Their library closes at about 2pm on Saturdays afternoon.

Their collection size is maybe half or even one-third of a shopping mall library in Singapore. However, the Ski Public Library supports only the local community here, which is considerably less that the residential population that a shopping mall library in Singapore supports.

But it seems that some things are quite similar in terms of user behaviour -- I saw that their newspaper section tended to attract the senior citizens, just like in Singapore's case.

Too bad we couldn't stay longer. Would have wanted to learn more about how they managed their collections, the selection criteria, on how they promoted their library, their staffing and administrative norms etc.

Took a cab ride back to Oslo city, as my colleague had another meeting to attend. Had a nice chat with the taxi driver (I may post about it another time).

7pm, we attended the caucus for Chinese-speaking delegates.

I think there was easily 100 attendees to this session, of which many were from China. There were a few caucus sessions held concurrently, grouped by language.

I have to remind myself that English is not the first language for majority of the IFLA delegates here. I think a caucus is sort of like a gathering/ briefing session spoken in that particular language (which means typically they are from the same country or region). The speakers were usually the section members in the IFLA governing board, and would provide an update on what's being discussed at the board level.

Tomorrow's the official opening of 71st session of IFLA.

Tag: IFLA, oslo 2005