order to expand his business. But he also remarks on the fact that Ireland is a country that has a long history of producing great storytellers and is famous for its generous and welcoming spirit–and this spirit comes easily to him and his staff. Whether it is the storytelling that is marketing or the helping spirit of customer support, Paul has no doubt that the Irishness of Ex Odo is helpful. As we at Charleston were so well aware, COVID created huge problems for conferences and called for a lot of creativity and thinking on-the-go, including creating virtual and hybrid events. But societies have been facing challenges for many years, particularly those that rely on a journal to generate revenue. Societies have also lost some independence by being integrated into big publishing platforms. I asked how Ex Ordo can help societies, and this is where Paul becomes passionate — and you should listen to the podcast to get the full answer — about the possibilities of integrating the annual conference with powerful conference software such as Ex Ordo.
And are societies not missing an opportunity to regain some of their independence by drawing their members in with such ongoing engagement? Are they perhaps missing opportunities to identify research that could be turned into an article for their journal, to identify engaged researchers who may be able to generate excitement throughout the year–and who may not be able to come to the annual conference at all? And similarly, could societies not benefit from generating data throughout the year through this engagement — about who their members are, what their interests are, where they come from and what virtual events and sponsors they most engage with? Paul’s focus, when working with scholarly societies, is on adding value. Societies need to think about their members, think about what the new conference technology like Ex Ordo makes possible, and to see how they can innovate to add value to the careers of their members. Subscriptions that encourage engagement throughout the year, employing a platform such as Ex Ordo, sound like a great place to start.
The annual conference has always been the centerpiece of the event planner’s calendar. The society books a venue and then brings in thousands of people from all over the world to meet for a week or so. And then the planning begins again for next year’s conference. What COVID showed us is that, while the annual conference is a wonderful opportunity for colleagues to meet, there are also other opportunities for engagement for societies and journals throughout the year. Why don’t societies use a virtual platform to increase engagement across the year in sync with the research and publication cycle? Why not integrate the society’s journals into a membership fee that would also cover recurring virtual events, allowing members to discuss and critique published materials together in a more ongoing manner?
Back Talk continued from page 62 wrote about the work in this column) on the Offline Internet Consortium, a band of innovators and explorers working hard to bring network-quality information to the half of the world’s population that doesn’t have or can’t properly use broadband networks. The idea for that consortium was born out of a session at WLIC in Wroclaw, Poland, in 2017 when we happened to hear Japri Masli from Sarawak in Malaysia (he was then a rising star and now director of the state library there) describe a low-tech and high-touch project he was leading to bring offline internet to rural Sarawak. I had already heard of two similar projects, one based in Arizona and another based in France, and had the impulse to see what we could do to identify more such groups and bring them together with common interests.
an organizing meeting in Kuala Lumpur; and since then hosting exciting programmatic meetings in Dublin in 2019, in Oslo in 2020 (the week before the pandemic landed on us), and Rotterdam in 2023. In 2024, we’re looking at Istanbul as a venue, because we’ve seen the energizing results of librarians finding ways to support modest but targeted publishing projects — usually open access in distribution — that give voice to communities not advantaged by the mass media and record and disseminate cultural history of people who might otherwise be forgotten.
I’ve served on multiple IFLA committees in various roles, including three stints on the IFLA Professional Council that oversees the work of many hundreds of volunteers who come together in the professional sections (committees, one could call them) and special interest groups that facilitate meeting, information sharing, and collaboration among like-minded people from around the world. The Library Publishing Special Interest Group is close to my heart — starting with an IFLA preconference in Ann Arbor in 2016, when the main WLIC was in Columbus, Ohio; then taking off two years later with
Istanbul has been chosen because of its fledgling library publishing programs, because of its location straddling Europe and the Middle East, the relative ease of attracting a wider audience (beyond Europe and North America), and in lieu of gathering for the annual WLIC. We’ll be sorry not to see as many friends and colleagues as we usually do. These networks of people brought together around the world are precious opportunities for librarianship to find ways to reach out further and support users more effectively in communities of every kind. You might not be reading this column if the Charleston Conference weren’t some part of your life and you know what is possible on that scale. The global work of IFLA is like Charleston but with hugely wider horizons.
56 Against the Grain / December 2023 - January 2024
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