Au revoir, Quebec

This will be my last blog post from Le Congres de l'IFLA en Quebec. I hope you've enjoyed the running commentary. Normal - more intermittent - service will be resumed from Ridgmount Street some time next week.

Yesterday (Friday) was the day after the Closing Session and most delegates switched from conference mode into travel and/or holiday mode. The various Standing Committees of IFLA met to plan their programmes of activities for the next twelve months and I had a lengthy meeting with the Working Group on the IFLA Statutes to consider IFLA's Rules of Procedure (equivalent to CILIP's General Regulations). But otherwise it was a day for relaxation.

So I began by watching TV over breakfast as the Canadian women tried to beat the US women in the Olympic football ("soccer" over here) quarter final. In England there's a saying: in international football twenty two men run around and the Germans win. In Canada there's a similar saying: twenty two women run around and the Americans win. And thus it was with a goal in extra time to give the US a 2-1 win and deny the Canadians their first Beijing medal.

The lack of medals was beginning to cause a high degree of national anxiety as Canadian athletes achieved their personal best only to be berated by the media for missing out on the podium places. Happily the medal duck has now been broken and the sun in shining again in Quebec and across the nation.

After the Rules of Procedure meeting I took a stroll along the Heights of Abraham - the parkland by the St Lawrence river where, in 1759, the Brits under General Wolfe scaled the cliffs and routed General Montcalm's French force thus winning Canade for le Royaume-Uni. I wonder if the 250th anniversary of Wolfe's victory will be celebrated next year with as much fervour as the 400th anniversary of the founding of Quebec City is being celebrated this year?!

A good walk should always be followed by a good dinner and the Louis Hebert on Grande Allee Est certainly provided that with excellent Canadian red wine to drink and (veggies look away now) caribou to eat. They even stuck a sparkler in my dessert, having been tipped off by my companions that today (Saturday) is my birthday. Oh yes, the IFLA Congress always ages me...

Today (Saturday) only the final twenty five or so people involved with the IFLA Governing Board are left. During my first meeting here - way back on the 7th of August - the Convention Centre was filled with the Knights of Columbus; now it's filled with the Canadian Bar Association (lawyers, sadly, not bartenders) with the IFLA presence scaled down to just the one room for the IFLA GB meeting.

It was a good GB meeting, if a long one. We started at 9.00am and ended just after 5.00pm with a presentation to the retiring IFLA Secretary General Peter Lor. Some of the agenda felt rather like a meeting of the CILIP Council as we considered the IFLA finances (budget forecast to break even at year end) and membership fees (increased for 2009 in line with Dutch inflation at 1.9 per cent). Some agenda items marked key milestones in work I've been engaged in personally: the new capacity building focus of the FAIFE programme of activity was approved; work on an advocacy framework for IFLA was endorsed; a set of strategic priorities for the period 2009 to 2011 was agreed; and the revised Rules of Procedure were ratified. Some agenda items set the scene for future professional activity by IFLA as we considered the increasing convergence between libraries, archives and museums, discussed the barriers in accessing personally identifiable information in historical records, and recorded formally our approval of the IFLA Manifesto on Transparency, Good Governance, and Freedom from Corruption.

We also shared our reflections of the Quebec Congress, recognising that outcomes will be discussed more formally at the next GB meeting, in The Hague in December, when we'll have all the facts and figures.  The Governor General of Canada (who spoke at the Opening Ceremony) has requested a report on the problems experienced with entry visas so some good may come of that. The message for 2009 in Milan and 2010 in Brisbane is clear, however: if you need a visa, apply early so that any problems can be addressed well before the Congress begins. Some delegates did not find everything to their liking and the list of criticisms - around accommodation, access to translation headsets, deficiencies in the Convention Centre's facilities, and the quality of the cultural events laid on - sounded very familiar to someone who's been involved in organising an IFLA Congress (Glasgow 2002) and several Umbrella conferences. You can't please all the people all the time and when you're trying to do your best for over 3,300 participants (the latest estimate of attendance here) from over 130 different nationalities some things will inevitably go awry. But the GB agreed that the professional content of the Congress had been of high quality, the networking and sense of communication across diverse languages had been outstanding,  and the city of Quebec had been a great location. We left the GB meeting and walked across the road to the Hilton bar for a final drink together in very good spirits.

Now it's Saturday evening. I'll close dowm my computer, go for a stroll, get a bite to eat, and then pack my bags and get ready for the long journey home which begins tomorrow (Sunday) lunchtime. It's time to return to the real world and it'll feel good to be back home when I arrive on Monday morning. Au revoir, Quebec - et merci beaucoup.