Who goes to IFLA?
A brief analysis of the participants at IFLA 2003 in Berlin - part 1

Berlin

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.

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.

Participation by world region

The main data on participation by region are given in Table 1.

The great gap in participation rates occurs, as we would expect, between the developing and the developed world.

The differences within the two groups are also substantial. In the South, the region of South Asia has a very low level of participation. In the North, Northern Europe has a very high level of participation. Denmark alone had four times as many delegates as India.

The German organizing committee should be relieved that Northern Europe is exceptional. If 593 delegates per 100 million had been the normal rate, 35 000 library people would have turned up in Berlin.

The location of the conference surely makes an impact. Berlin is not far from Copenhagen. If the conference had been arranged in Bangkok or Colombo, rather fewer Danes and many more Indians would certainly show up. In the near future I hope to analyze similar data from IFLA conferences located in the South.

But I suspect the rates between the most and the least favored countries will still differ by a factor of 100 or more. Wealth is much more important than distance. Remote New Zealand - with 4 million inhabitants - had 12 delegates. Distant Pakistan - with 150 million - had 3.

More to follow ....

Data and methods

Ninety percent registered before July 15 and were included in the main list of participants. About three hundred only registered at the conference itself, and were included in the supplementary list. The list contains information on the names, the professional title, the institutional affiliation and the address of the delegates.

Cultural regions

I have divided the world`s countries into 12 cultural regions. The regions correspond to well-known political and geographical areas. But some decisions must still be made. And they could have been made differently.

• The division between Northern and Southern Europe follows linguistic criteria. Austria is therefore allocated to the North.
• The border between the Germanic and the Romance languages cuts across Belgium and Switzerland. I place Belgium in the South, with France, and Switzerland in the North, with Germany.
• I have put Afghanistan in South Asia rather than in the Middle East.
• I have put Mauretania in sub-Saharan Africa
• Melanesia was originally settled from New Guinea, so I place Papua New Guinea in Oceania.
• Some states span several regions. These have not been divided. This means that
  • Siberia is included in Europe rather than Asia
  • Tibet and Xinjiang is included in East Asia (with China) rather than in Central Asia
  • Western New Guinea is placed in South East Asia (with Indonesia) rather than in Oceania.

Country statistics

The population data are mid-year estimates for 2003. The data on economic size (GDP = Gross Domestic Product) are estimates for 2002. Both come from CIA. The world factbook. Despite its origin, this is a very substantial and valuable statistical resource on the WWW.

In the tables and the statistical analysis I have only included countries with more than 1 million inhabitants. For the sake of completeness I also mention the nine smaller countries that participated, with a total of 28 delegates:

• 1 participant from Barbados, Greenland, Guam, the Holy See and Martinique
• 2 participants from Malta and Fiji
• 8 participants from Luxembourg
• 11 participants from Iceland

The conclusions in the paper do not depend on highly accurate data. For legibility, many numbers have therefore been rounded down to two (or even one) significant digits. This means that I write

• 9 600 USD - rather than 9 598 - for the GDP per capita of Botswana in 2002
• 1 300 million - rather than 1,286,975,468 - for the population of China in 2003

Sample data

For the analysis of library sectors I took a 5% random sample (150 participants) from the final participation list. Both countries and persons (within countries) are ordered alphabetically. The sampling method was simple: the first person on every page was selected. This gave a total of 138 persons. An additiuonal 12 were selected by taking the last person on every 11th page.

Obvious misprints in the data were corrected. When the professional title, or the institutional affiliation, was missing, the nearest person with complete information was selected as a substitute. In some cases (abbreviations, Asian names) the sector affiliation was uncertain. Usually, a web search resolved the issue.