Who goes to IFLA?
The rich, the mature and the academic

700.000 librarians

Three thousand library people went to the IFLA conference in Berlin. A highly informal web report from OCLC states that the world as a whole has about 700 thousand librarians. On a world scale, this would correspond to one librarian per 10.000 persons.

The number seems reasonable. If it is correct, about 0,5% of the profession were present in Berlin. Unfortunately, OCLC does not list its sources. At this point I do nor have reasonable statistics on library staff in individual countries. As a substitute I look at participation relative to the population as a whole.

Rich and poor countries

Since the world has 6 300 million people, the average rate of participation in Berlin was about 5 participants for every 100 million persons. But every IFLA visitor knows that the rate differs greatly between countries, between age groups, and between types of libraries. There are many reasons for this inequality. The cost of travel and participation is substantial - typically around two thousand dollars per head. This favours people from big institutions and from the more developed countries. North Western Europe and North America is well represented. South and South East Asia is not.

All global organizations meet this problem. And I am happy to see that IFLA makes great efforts to counteract the effect of economic inequality. When people are elected to the governing bodies of IFLA, and when papers are selected for presentations, geographical considerations are important. The conference venue moves from region to region: Berlin (2003) - Buenos Aires (2004) - Oslo (2005) - Seoul (2006) - Durban (2007).

Few young people

When it comes to generations, the effort seems to be smaller. The people that milled around in the conference lobby were (like myself) on the mature side. They looked more like a traditional opera audience than the people you see at rock concerts.

Seniority leads to respectability. I had the impression many participants represented higher levels of management. They spoke like cultural planners and managers rather than librarians in direct contact with the public. I saw some young faces in Berlin. But most of the youngsters turned out to be local volunteers.

More academic than public

Librarianship is a single profession. But libraries are divided. When people in general speak about libraries, they imagine the library "everybody" knows; the public library that serves a local community. The other half of the library world is less visible. It consists of all the academic and special libraries that serve a limited group of students, teachers, researchers and staff.

At IFLA it was hard to see whether delegates came from the public or the institutional sector. But from the titles of the delegates it is possible to gather information on the distribution between sectors. A quick count shows that roughly 20% of the participants came from public libraries:

1. Institutional and national libraries - 67%. See sample data
2. Public libraries - 20%. See sample data
3. Library and government organizations - 12%. See sample data.

This means that the public library sector is not as well represented as academic and special libraries. I need to collect national library statistics to judge the degree of underrepresentation. Here I only provide some US data. In the United States there are about 30.000 librarians in public libraries, 25.000 in academic libraries and 15.000 in special libraries. (Source: ALA Library fact sheets).

We know from several Western countries that the academic library sector tends to be somewhat smaller than the public library sector. The number of librarians in special libraries is much smaller. Approximately 40% of the people at IFLA came from academic libraries.

My tentative conclusion is: public librarians participate only half as frequently as their academic counterparts.