IFLA Newsletter, February 2025: Promoting engagement
27 February 2025
The message below accompanies the February 2025 edition of the IFLA Newsletter.
“The Federation is an independent, international, non-governmental, not-for-profit organization, which advances the interests of library and information associations, libraries and information services, librarians and the communities they serve throughout the world.”
About us—IFLA, 2025
Well, how did we get here?
This month’s newsletter, all of our newsletters really, answer the question “what is IFLA?” by taking a curated deep dive into our most recent activities, updates and initiatives. February saw our latest Trend Report published in a revised version with a skills agenda, IFLA WLIC 2025 kicking into gear, a lively IFLA Nominations period just wrapping up, IFLA100 survey results released, new guidelines from our LPD Section under review, and our policy and advocacy work driving the Culture2030Goal campaign, the right copyright for African libraries, and much more. A busy month.
While our current work is based on the IFLA Strategy 2024-2029, the engagement we harness and cultivate, in all its forms, has been both a driver and a goal since the beginning of the Federation. As you explore our current work in this newsletter, we also invite you to look at IFLA as we dial the clock back, and back even further to where and how it all began. What was IFLA in 1927? In 1977? In 2002?
IFLA has always been a work in progress, a balancing act which continues today. A path to understanding IFLA is to look at what we’ve done as much as what we currently do. What we’re doing is expressed in this month’s newsletter, appropriately under the theme of “promoting engagement”, but looking into what we’ve done during the long 20th century has just gotten a little bit easier and richer.
As IFLA makes way for its centenary in 2027, it is useful to think about how and why we began and have evolved over the decades; 100 years is a long time for any organisation, public or private. As we look forward to another century of “advancing the interests” of our stakeholders, we invite you to explore how we’ve stayed both relevant and engaged throughout the years—and to understand how many of today’s initiatives and successes are firmly rooted in our years of voluntarism, outreach, partnership, advocacy and continuous evolution.
In a way, engagement is what we’ve always been about, a river that runs through all the years. Read on and discover!
Louis Takács
IFLA Communications Manager