I’m blogging from Seoul, South Korea, this week as I’m at the IFLA conference with a few thousand of my favorite people from all over the world. I do wish Blogger, however, would stop noticing where I am, since all the instructions are in Korean. It’s a good think I remember, spatially, where the commands are on the screen.

One interesting measure of the “internationality” of the IFLA conference is to search for the organization’s acronym in Technorati . Most of the posts are in languages other than English.

There was an interesting discussion this morning about libraries and advocacy. Although I’ve been in similar discussions before, this one was different because of the many nationalities and types of libraries involved in the discussion. Definitely food for thought. We in the developed world tend to take it for granted that having libraries and information available for everybody is a goal understood by and wanted by the world at large. Yet in some parts of the world, that is far from the case. It isn’t just about money, it’s about culture, context, and politics. One story that came out of Africa equated libraries with mothers because they share the same nurturing functions. I confess I’ve never thought of a library as my mother — and I don’t intend to, either!

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