The Irish Times – 23 July
“The world’s most important international library conference will be held at the Convention Centre Dublin from July 26th to 29th.
The World Library and Information Congress is organised by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), the largest global library organisation representing tens of thousands of libraries and librarians worldwide.
The Library Association of Ireland is the local host organisation and has been working closely with IFLA for more than two years to bring it to Ireland for the first time. This will be the first in-person IFLA Congress since 2019. It will attract nearly 2,000 delegates from more than 100 countries, making it the largest global library conference in 2022.
As a curtain raiser to the main event, a ‘flash mob’ will be held in central Dublin on July 25th, featuring public readings of Ulysses to mark its 100th anniversary. On July 26th, former president Mary Robinson will give a keynote address at the opening ceremony.
This will be followed by three days of talks, workshops and exhibitions on topics ranging from Library History to Artificial Intelligence and including a speaker from Ukraine discussing the current state of libraries in that country.
Our own libraries will be on international display, with a full day of visits to libraries throughout Ireland included in the programme.
Full information on the event including the programme is available at 2022.ifla.org
The Goethe-Institut Irland is to host a travelling virtual reality exhibition at its premises on Merrion Square, Dublin, which invites visitors to reimagine the future of libraries as interactive spaces that offer multisensory forms of storytelling.
Entitled The Infinite Library, the multimedia installation’s central piece is a vast VR library, set in a cave, in which visitors can explore a series of smaller sub-libraries, dedicated to topics as diverse as Polynesian navigation, South-Indian puppetry and European alchemy.
Creative director of the exhibition Mika Johnson said: “The Infinite Library seeks to embed human stories within a much grander narrative, one which includes the birth of our planet and the evolution of all life forms.
“It reimagines what we generally understand a library to be and offers a glimpse of what a library might look like in the future. The virtual library space at the heart of the installation is conceived as a living organism, a kind of embodiment of knowledge that introduces itself to visitors personally before inviting them to explore its house.”
The Infinite Library will open on Saturday, July 23rd and run until July 29th. The exhibition is free to visit and all are welcome.”
We All Deserve Better 