 Y Llywodraeth, wrth gwrs, sefydlu'r cywir i'w cyfrifio Llywodraeth ym Mwneud yng Nghymru. Mi'n fretg i'r cyfrifio Llywodraeth ym Mwneud yma, ond mae'r cyfrifio Llywodraeth ym Mwneud ym Mwneud. Rydym ni'n ei bod gyda'r gweithio'r cyllid o'r Llebarod. Rydw i'n clywed i chi'n gwybod i chi'n gweithio, yn y gweld y gwirionedd newydd yn y 43rd annuol Llebarod. Llebarod yn cyfrins i'r gweithio'n gweithio'r cyfrins i'r gweithio'r wir When national librarians, state librarians and research librarians from European universities can meet together in one place for a week to discuss topics of mutual interest and importance to us and to our users, our researchers, members of the general public whom we're serving. gyda'r gweithio gyda'r gweithwyr, Cristina Hormia Putan, ac yn gweithio gyda'r gweithwyr. Ond mae'r gweithio gyda'r gweithwyr Prof. Ina Drufietti, gyda'r Minister for Education and Science i'r Republikol Latvia, gyda'r gweithwyr. Yn ystod, mae'r gweithwyr, mae'r gweithwyr gyda'r gweithwyr, hwnna'r Llwyaith Bwysigol Llywodraeth Llywodraeth Llywodraeth gyda'r gweithwyr Llywodraeth. Mae'n gwladol am gweithio gyda'r gyda'r gweithwyr. Mae'r gweithwyr sy'n dweud yng Nghymru sy'n gwirioneddau o ffordd gwahaniaeth ac gweithio'n gweld ymwneud. Albert Einstein was asked once how we could make our children smart. His reply was surprisingly simple. If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales. Dear friends, hereby I want to emphasise that there exists a clear connection between reading and intelligence, between growing knowledge and conviction that the world doesn't have to be like this, and things can be different, and libraries have a special place in this process of growth, evolution and progress. Because libraries are about freedom, freedom to read, freedom to speak, freedom of ideas, freedom of expression and communication. Libraries are also about lifelong education and science, about opening the world, about free access to global information. Everything changes when we read. Some people worry that in the 21st century we misunderstand what's the true purpose of libraries. If you perceive a library as a shelf of books, it may seem outdated in a world in which most information exists digitally, but such a comprehension means missing the very ideas of the library. The soul of libraries are not physical books. It's an information, learning and freedom. We know that information has value and the right information has enormous value. In the last decade we have moved from an information scarce economy to one driven by an information glut. Libraries are places that people go to for information. Books are only the tip of the information iceberg. They still are here. They belong in libraries. Just as libraries have already become places, you can go to get access to ebooks, DVDs and audiobooks. But libraries are also, for example, places that people who may not have computers, who may not have internet connections, socialize and navigate the world. Libraries are places for information and gives everybody access to it. Saying all this, I would like to oppose those who live in convictions that books are outdated and libraries belong to the past. In contrary, libraries are gates to the future. Communication systems and technology development are continually changing the way people access information and the demand for global information is growing significantly. We have an obligation to support libraries, to use libraries, to encourage others to use them, to redefine the mission of libraries and to find every new and contemporary manifestation of them. Dear audience, one says that your personal library is your portrait. Per phrasing this, we can conclude that that national library is a true portrait of a nation. Therefore, I am very proud and happy that Latvia is hosting the Libre annual conference in this new building of the National Library of Latvia. The title of the conference, Research Libraries in the 2020 Information Landscape, coincides very well to the informal name of this building, which is the Castle of Light. Yes, indeed, libraries in the 21st century are castles of light, gates to the future and manifestation of freedom of thought, speech and ideas. I hope that the portrait of our nation, which you face with the help of our Castle of Light, will raise interest about Latvia as a free and democratic country, which belongs to the system of values of western world and where education, science and lifelong learning is one of the highest priorities. Ladies and gentlemen, double Pulitzer Prize winner Barbara Tuchmans has said that the books are careers of civilization without books, histories silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at the standstill. They are engines of change, windows of the world, lighthouses erected in the seas of time. In the end of my speech, I would like to thank everybody for coming together. These days during the Libre conference, the gate to the future is widely open and everyone who has an interest and courage has a possibility to get an insight into the future dimensions of our world. I wish you fruitful discussions in Riga in the European capital of culture. I wish you a pleasant stay in our city and new ideas to be developed during this conference. Thank you for your attention. It is now my pleasure and privilege to invite Mr Andres Philx, who is director here of the National Library of Latvia, to address the audience. Your Excellency, President Sconesa, President of Ministers Sconesa, Delford, all Irish President of Libre, their colleagues. I am pleased to welcome you to the 43rd Library annual conference that takes place in Riga. I would like to express my gratitude to Libre Board for its decision to choose Riga and the National Library of Latvia for organizing this conference. It is a great honor and serious challenge for us. It took a long time to get new building for the National Library. As an institution, the library was founded shortly after the Proclamation of the Republic of Latvia in 1919. Since 1926, debates on the project of the building designed especially for the Latvian State Library commenced. At the time, discussions resulted in implementation of an alternative project. In 1935, the monument of freedom was inaugurated. The nation's most important monument, located in the center of Riga, had not only been the largest construction but also served as a key reminder of the Latvian state as regards the concept of freedom during many years of the Soviet regime. Construction of the library was being planned in all the next decades. However, the goal was achieved only in the independent republic of Latvia. It took 25 years to implement the project. We are proud that Gunard Birkert, the most significant Latvian architect who has designed many libraries in the United States of America, has now fulfilled his dream in his motherland. The library just started working in the new building. On January 18, when Riga becomes the European capital of culture, we had started a symbolic book chain during which books were brought from the old library building to the new building by the dedicated book lovers. There were 14,000 people from all regions of Latvia who were standing in freezing cold weather as it was minus 40 degrees. There were two buses with Estonian librarians and a group of Latvian school of Stockholm arrived by ferry. There were librarians from Lithuania and Russia as well. The oldest participant was 100 years old lady. Information regarding the book chain was spread all over Europe via German and Austrian TV channels. However, all transportation and arrangement works are still continuing. As a final inauguration of the new building will take place on August 29, that is the 95th anniversary of the National Library of Latvia. However, the library has already started to provide services for book readers and the first four floors of the building currently working. The fact that Riga is currently the European capital of culture is certainly very important. There are excellent cultural activities organized in Riga to represent additional and modern cultural values, Latvian and European culture, creativity and cultural heritage. Yesterday the exhibition entitled 1514 books 2014 was opened. The exhibition was prepared by National Library within the framework of the European capital of cultural activities in Riga. For example, the world choirs games will be launched next week. Today in the afternoon you will have an opportunity to participate in the exhibition opening event entitled Johansson's and Johansson's story. The exhibition has been created as a bridge from creative works of the Latvian avant-garde Gustavsklutsis beginning of the 20th century to the Latvian modern art of the 21st century. Today Gitton Cremor is arriving in Riga and perform concerts in his native city next days. Unfortunately, the rich library conference program most probably will not give us an opportunity to enjoy these cultural activities. We will be busy with the modern topicalities that are the most relevant for the European research libraries. The library is not only the first big international conference for the new library building, but it is also the largest, greatest conference in our branch in the history of Latvia. It will be a serious challenge as all the systems are currently just in the beginning of exploitation in the new library. However, I believe that the local committee has worked very carefully as regards all the details to ensure that most comfortable conditions for you during presentation of our building as well as during other events organized in other places in Riga and outside the city during various excursions in the country. There are also other Latvian academic libraries involved in our working groups such as the Library of the University of Latvia, Riga Technical University etc. The section of young specialists of the Latvian Libraries Association constitutes the core of our volunteers. We have obtained support from the Ministry of Economics and Ministry of Culture, the Riga 2014 Foundation and RigaCity. We would like to express our gratitude to the 41st Liber Committee in Tartu for the friendly consultation provided to us. We also would like to thank the Liber Secretariat for the continuous support, as well as to all Liber Board, especially to Claudia Fabian who helped us with the organization of exhibition 1514 book 2014. Ladies and gentlemen, I wish you all a successful conference and enjoy your time in Riga. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to offer a few short words of thanks to our hosts here in Latvia for the level of preparation and the care which they have taken to make this auditorium and this building available for the Liber Conference this year. If we look at the academic program, there is a theme which comes through it and that is trying to identify what the role of libraries in the 21st century should be. Many academics, many senior decision makers in universities, I come from the university sector so I can talk about universities. Many decision makers will say, well, everything is available on the web now. It's all digital, Paul. So why do we need physical spaces? Why do we need libraries? What's the point of having a physical space when people can interact with learning resources and research information at the end of a wire? Well, I think at the end of the four days we will probably have found the answer to that question. The answer I normally give when I ask this question myself in London is this. Well, two things really. First, if you look, as all my fellow university librarians in the UK have done, if you look at the number of students coming into the physical library spaces, the number of students coming into the building increases year on year. This wouldn't be the case if students thought that learning and research facilities were all available electronically and no physical space was required. Many of us here in Riga will be planning building extensions and refurbishments for our physical spaces back home to cope with the increasing numbers of students who want to use the physical facilities. So the idea that learning is an isolated digital experience at the end of a wire is simply wrong because education is a social experience as well as an academic experience. And that social experience is provided by physical learning spaces, fit for purpose in the 21st century that meet the needs and requirements of how students want to work and want to study. This may not be true. This next fact may not be true across the whole of Europe, but certainly in London there is a great move for research libraries, academic libraries to be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Certainly my library in UCL is open 24 hours a day from October 1 when the academic session starts right through till the end of the following summer. Why is it like that? It's like that because that's what students said they want. This is how they study. Some of my older colleagues in the university say, oh, students should not be in the library at two o'clock in the morning. They should be tucked up in bed with a couple of cocoa. I think that's a very paternalistic attitude. I think we have to accept that young people have worked in a completely different way to the way that maybe I worked when I was a student 20, 30 years ago. The world has changed. Libraries have changed and what we need to do and will do this week with the academic program is to identify how those changes are affecting the types of service that we offer and how we can best meet the needs of the users that we are serving. Latvia is clearly the place to be this week to have those discussions and I look forward to meeting as many of you as possible in the next few days as we discuss, debate, decide how to innovate and then network with colleagues here in Riga. So again, on behalf of the leader board, may I thank the National Librarian and our distinguished colleagues on the podium here today for allowing us the opportunity to have this time and this space to have these discussions here in a very amenable atmosphere. Thank you very much. It's now my pleasure to invite our Vice President, Christina Hormier-Putherland, to take the stage and talk about the academic program. Dear colleagues, dear friends, so nice to see you all here. So also welcome from my behalf. I'm Christina Hormier-Putherland and I have been chairing the conference program committee for the last three or four years. And we have defined a theme of this conference and you can see the theme on our conference program on the first page. So it's research libraries in the 2020 information landscape. And this theme, it reflects very well Libra strategy, which focuses on research data, the whole life cycle and open access and also the need to change our practices at libraries. So we call it resaping the research library. And the third pillar in our strategy is advocacy and communication. And actually just this spring we have formed a new working group under this advocacy and communication steering committee, which deals with copyright, because legal issues nowadays they are everywhere. So it's very good that we are also prepared to answer the questions. Here you can see the members of our conference program committee. So I'd like to thank now officially it's one of you for your hard work in this committee. And as you can see at the bottom of the slide we invite new members. So there are some small changes in the group. So if some of you would be interested in joining our group so you are warmly welcome and you can inform me or Libra office about your interest. So what are we doing in this group? So first of all we define the theme and the topics. We use the call for papers process. So in November about we announced the call for papers and then after that the really hard work begins to evaluate the papers and give feedback to the authors and so on. When you are looking at the names I'm sure you identify many of them but we try to keep good balance between different parts of Europe and also gender balance and also age balance nowadays. So I'd very much like to see young professionals also in this group because our work is changing and IT is coming very strongly and many of our young professionals are very good in these fields. Some numbers so we have here 350 participants from 36 countries, not bad. Five keynotes, 35 presentations and you can see here the number of submissions and acceptance rate so it's not that easy to get your paper through to this conference. And then we have also 20 posters. I have some practical issues to announce so this year we have organized the program by themes. We hope this will help you in choosing the session you'd like to attend. We are going to ask your opinion in a survey next week so actually it is the conference survey covering all things but we are also going to ask you about this so please give this in mind when you answer the survey. Also we have a vote for best poster so please give your vote at Libadesk and then there is a business center so you will find workstations on all levels starting from the bottom until level three. Those of you who give presentations so you should follow the instructions which you see now on the screen so to give your presentation well beforehand so that it will be mounted on the computer before your presentation. And also those of you who have posters and we will have the short poster presentation here so please bring your PowerPoint slide one slide today. I'd like to invite all of you also to visit the sponsor area which is here just opposite the main auditorium and I think this is all enjoy the conference network and give your feedback next week. Ladies and gentlemen there are one or two formalities that we need to complete before we can move on to the academic session of the program. Liber is a Stichting foundation by Dutch law and I should now formally declare open the meeting of participants in Stichting. We will have a participants meeting later in the week but in preparation for that there are one or two announcements that we need to make to you as participants in the foundation and so I ask Dr Anne Matheson our secretary general to come to the podium to make these announcements. Good afternoon colleagues. I shall read the nominations for appointment to the Liber Executive Board at the meeting of participants tomorrow. For president Miss Christina Horwio-Pruthinen National Library of Finland Helsinki. For vice president Miss Jeanette Frye Bibliotech Cantonal Universitaire Lausanne Switzerland. For three executive board vacancies Dr Wolfram Horstman getting in University and State Library Germany. Dr Martin Hallick Tartu University and Tartu University Library Estonia and Mr Martin Svoboda National Technology Library Prague Czech Republic. There are also three re-appointments Dr Mathes van Ottingham Erasmus Rotterdam University Library and also the Liber treasurer. Mr Julien Roche University Lille 1 France and Mr Wilhelm Wiedmark Stockholm University Library Sweden. And for Liber participants that is to say Liber members please remember to collect your voting cards tomorrow from 11 to 1530 at the registration desk. Thank you. It is now my great pleasure to invite our guest speaker to address us from the podium. Our speaker is Dr Faira Fike Frye Burger formerly president of Latvia between 1997 and 2007 and president of the World Leadership Alliance Club de Madrid in Latvia. The topic of Dr Frye Burger's talk is on the power of the word and the imagination. Madam President the floor is yours. Your Excellency Madam Minister of Education. Dear Mr Wilkes. Ladies and gentlemen. In the beginning was the word and the word was made flesh. What Saint John the Evangelist meant by it of course was a particular theological and sociological message. But the word logos that he used was used by the ancient Greeks in a variety of meanings of which we still find echoes in our everyday language. We talk about logic as a process where rational reasoning and thinking is sort of lined up in a row. Our thoughts are lined up in a row when we try to make the best possible reasoning sense out of them. When you ask for your bill in a Greek restaurant they will be bringing you a logarithmus and it's nothing to do with logarithms. It's simply the sum of the items that you had ordered for that particular meal. Logos therefore refers both to logic, to reason, to structure, to ordering, to discrete entities and their counting but yes also to the word. And it's the word I'd like to talk to you about today. Right at this moment I'm using the spoken word and the human body has been the incarnation, the word made fresh. Made flesh ever since the invention of our remote ancestors by, we don't know even whether it was homo sapiens were the inventors of language or of those various extinct species that preceded them on this planet. We do not have any idea and I'm afraid that we never will because the word is something that is ephemeral. It is by definition fleeting. It is carried on the human breath and when the human breath ceases to be the word and the transmission word by that particular agent simply ceases as well. This is why memory has used the human race, has been used by the human race for so long as an element of seizing, of capturing the fleeting word of spoken language. This is why poetry and oral literature have built up structures, be they rhythmic or phonetic or plot structures that will allow us to encode the flow of continuous information that we get in spoken language, to parse it into units, to encode it and to carry it in memory and retrieve it and reproduce it as was done for centuries and continues to be done in many parts of the world by various bards, poets, agreeats, counters of tales or singers of tales as a case may be. You can still see in many countries in Africa if you go to the marketplace that somebody will be telling a tale, a very interesting story. Just when a thing reaches a climax and you're wondering what's going to come next, he passes his hat around and says, well, dear audience, this is the moment when you look for coins to throw in my hat. Only then will he continue or possibly even wait for the next day if it's one of those markets that take place regularly. This is one way, therefore, of building suspense, but this is suspense that is built up in face-to-face interaction between living, breathing human beings who produce oral language or something entirely. Diaphanus invisible in the air simply seized, of course, by our very specialised brains in that regard, brains of that type lacking in any other species that we have so far studied. The word, by being captured only in memory, of course, becomes very fragile and very reliant and dependent on the direct transmission from ear to mouth from mouth to ear. It can do so through generations, but it still remains a fragile transmission when you think about it. It is no wonder that by the time great civilisations were created and great monuments of architecture accompanied the achievements of the rulers, that permanent inscriptions of the word started to be sought for. Here again, we really do not know when or how the written word was invented. We do know that the great many different forms of it were invented and with the latest, the alphabetic form being the latest of possible ones, and it is not excluded that sometime in the near or distant future a different form of encoding writing from our alphabetisation could be conceived and might be developed. Why not? There have been so many different ones, syllabic, iconic, symbolic or using elements, phrases, syllables and so on. Well, the capturing of the spoken word in written form was started out with two different intents in mind. One was to hide secret knowledge and to make it accessible only to the chosen few and to the elect among the population, but the other one was quite the contrary, to glorify the ruler and to proclaim to the world at large their great accomplishments. You have the various Egyptian pharaohs, not just of course having the Book of the Dead elements written and accompanying them in their elaborate tombs, but they also have monuments and temples where the pharaohs who built this or that temple to this or that god would proudly proclaim to the world, I, Ramses II or I, Tatmos III have built this building, I have instituted this, I have, for instance in the case of Ramses II, I have really sort of beaten the daylights out of the Hittites when what we know from other historical sources of the very contrary actually happened, but who was there? There was no press there at the time and when Ramses returned to Egypt he simply proclaimed that he had won the battle over the Hittites and that was that. And he became a great hero. The proclamation, loud proclamation of the glory of various rulers was one of the reasons that we were able to decipher both Egyptian inscriptions, but for the Mesopotamian type of writing, curiously enough, it is not so much, if you like, the laws of Hammurabi that were the big breakthrough. It was very simple, traders, merchants, commercial people, toting up how much they had, how much they sold, how much profit they made. They and their interests in arithmetic, they are in their interest in keeping precise records to make sure that their employees did not actually dip into the till even as they were working for them. That sort of thing actually, the practical aspects of recording things go way back to ancient Sumer and Babylonia. But imagine today, if we make the big leap to modern technologies, we have all of those aspects present and many new ones beside, and I'm sure that in your conversations and discussions here you will be broaching the topic of what the new leads are and where they might bring us. This I leave in your capable hands, you being the experts in the area. I'd just like to share a few thoughts with you going back to another great technological change that brought with it a huge societal change, and that was the invention of the printing press. Because until that time, until Gutenberg's invention, everything that had been seized and captured as written language had to be done rather laboriously by hand, and it could only be done once. Once you've carved an inscription on a stela, on a piece of marble, that's it, it stays there. Now it could be, mind you, what did happen is that the next pharaoh, for instance, would take the cartouche which contains the name of his predecessor and have it knocked out and have his own cartouche put in place. There was that sort of thing, in fact plenty of it, but otherwise it was done once and that was it. When Gutenberg came along with his invention, it was the modern era that started, even if it was all these centuries ago. Because what you started producing was an object, an object of consumption, a book or a pamphlet for that matter, which could be reproduced, mass produced and spread out to large numbers of people in an identical form. One did not have, laboriously, to spend generations of monks sitting in frozen, with frozen fingers in their scriptoria, as we see described in the novel, The Name of the Rose. It would take generations of monks to transcribe and re-transcribe documents now. You can produce them, of course, in ridiculously small numbers by our standards, but something totally, totally revolutionary in terms of the change that it introduced in society. But it wasn't just the accessibility of the written word, it was what that content of that word was. And this is where I think we started, in my understanding, also the first faltering steps of democracy. I'm not talking about the idea of democracy and of votes that you had in ancient Greece, which applied only to the elect, I mean the male, and definite social classes of the Indian society. But I'm talking now about the kind of democracy where any person, whatever, without prejudging their social status, what family they were born and how rich they were or something of that sort, would actually have access to information, to knowledge and ultimately to education. Now mind you, if the writing had been for centuries in the hand of the church, it is for the simple reason that it was considered that societies were made civilized, they were made human, if you like, by following moral precepts, by following religious precepts, religious precepts in the western part of the world in the Middle East, was seen as being based on sacred writings and therefore writing as such acquired an aura of sanctity and of importance that it might acquire even for something that was not part of scripture, that was not the holy word. And science and this questioning spirit, you see, came up against that conception of things that are true, thus once and forever. And even as sacred scripture was absolutely the basis of everything of the ideology that reign in society. So was Galen's medicine and so was Aristotle's politics and so on and so forth. Anything that was written down, anything that was an authority was to be followed with that aura that came from sacred scripture. And think now of the revolution when the Protestant movement came along in Europe and said, well, it's not just that the priests should be explaining to the congregation what sacred scripture means, because after all they're too stupid to understand themselves. So somebody with theological training needs to do it. When the Protestant said no, let them read the Bible and be inspired by the divine word, this was a breakthrough that for instance here in Latvia created an educated peasantry since the time of the Swedish kings who decided that every parish should have at least three years of schooling for even the children of the peasantry. So that they could read the catechism and learn it by heart and the catechism was not just the only thing, they should be also able to read their Bibles and meditate upon them every Sunday morning, which in fact most households in fact did. The ability to read then opened up doors to society that were simply unimaginable before. Literacy has been a fantastic mover of democracy across the world and nowadays when it's we're talking of the digital divide and digital literacy, when we're talking of the numerical divide and numerical literacy that is necessary. In fact we will be, we are already needing a literacy that is a multifunctional, multidimensional, multisensorial. And when you ladies and gentlemen look forward to the modern library that will be not just a depository of the written word, but it will also be a repository of endless visual documents and iconic records of everything starting from science. And going to poetry if you like poetry events or rock concerts or anything that sort and yes sound coming along but I devoutly hope that nobody ever invents smells and captures them and produces them in libraries because I just, I can't imagine sitting next to somebody who is if you like reading up on onions and meanwhile I am reading up roses and peonies and somehow I don't think that those two would make good neighbors to each other. Similarly, I don't know how many of you are old enough to remember the days when in libraries where you had a section where you could play records, not just borrow books or dictionaries and read them there without taking them home but actually listen to records. And this was before those things you put in your ears had been invented and made cheaply available. What meant that if you came into a library and happened to be there at the same time that one of its faithful customers came in as he did every day at the same time and put on a record of Richard Strauss' piece about Sarah Troustra but only the first bit where it goes boom boom boom boom and then he'd leave it playing and leave. So the good bits he would come in every day, he'd listen to the good bits and after that it becomes Richard Strauss you see and he thought it was just you know not exciting enough and he would calmly leave and leave the other customers there stuck with all the rest of this symphonic poem. Well this luckily by now, technically the problem has been solved and I'm sure that there are any number of other irritations that I remember from my long life from the ancient days when libraries only had books and when in fact the even more ancient days when books had to be, you could actually walk around the stacks which I thought well I think you still do in many libraries. How many libraries where you can walk around and look at the books actually get access to them. Well, not bad, not bad. I think there's a special pleasure you see for somebody to walk along shelves and shelves in the old fashioned way, not being kept away by a professional librarian who looks something like a dragon without the fire and who tells you to stand in line and wait your turn and fill out the slip properly and do this again please This isn't correct, I remember that from my student days a lot. There's a terrific pleasure in walking around along the stacks. I remember one particular occasion where I felt a book was literally beckoning to me for no particular reason, an anonymous book on an anonymous shelf in some section where I had wandered into by accident and I pulled out the book and it was a biography of Luther Burbank, the plant seleccioner and it happened to be to hit right on the nail on the head with a hand about an interest I had started taking at that age about growing plants and their breeding and that sort of thing as a hobby of course. And I thought what a marvelous thing to be able to sort of leave oneself open to serendipity, to coincidence, to opening unexpected Vistas simply from physically walking around. Of course you all realise how old fashioned this sounds and how old it makes me in your eyes because nowadays we do not walk with our little feet along the stacks that's much too physically tiring. We sit at a computer screen and we surf around on the internet and we then gather the information both fortuitous and specifically target without moving our behinds which may not be so good for our health by the way. Actually walking a few steps along the stacks wasn't that bad. But yes, changes are coming. Tremendous changes are coming in terms of technology and I think fantastic changes are coming in terms of availability of accessibility. When I was a young graduate student I was told by my professor, a very famous psychologist at McGill University or Heb that every serious scholar and researcher should start already doing their doctoral studies, subscribing to the really significant journals in their field. And so, like the obedient girl that I was, I actually started spending considerable proportion of my money on professional journals because I wanted to take myself seriously, you see, as an academic in that particular field. And I continued to do that, in fact until I was elected president of my country. At which point I went back to Canada where I had spent most of my life and I was going to pack up all these scientific journals. I was attached to them and they had cost me a great deal of money over the years and I wanted to bring them with me. And my research assistant who was helping me both throw out tons of paper and actually pack away those that I wanted to take, he looked at me and he said, Angab Freiburg, how many times in the past few decades have you opened the American psychologist for 1965? Well, I had to confess I hadn't. In fact, periodically we had to dust the things because nobody was touching them, neither myself nor my students nor anybody else. So that here we had this repository of knowledge and I was, really I remember the famous experiment by so and so and this and there and so. It was terrific and I knew exactly where they were. By touch I could almost find them in the dark. But you see those days are going on. Nowadays we have access to journals, not just online. I remember looking for a reprint I had for somebody, for a long article written in 1875 by Wilhelmann Fartenlatian, a solar mythology in which I happened to be writing a book. I had a copy of it way back in the old days before moving and all that and I couldn't find it. My husband found it in three minutes on the internet and I got the whole blessed article in several installments in that particular journal, scientific scholarly journal of 1875, no trouble at all. Nowadays, as you know, there's a movement for making research journals, very expensive ones, which are a real problem in countries like Africa in making them free. I have the privilege of sitting on the international board of the Library of Alexandria and of course the very name has a glory to it in terms of reconstructing that center of knowledge of the ancient world which was so brutally destroyed because of fanaticism and prejudice. The Library of Alexandria serves as intermediary with various other libraries and you may be involved in these projects and may know about them, which will be providing a number of African universities with certain scientific scholarly journals that they would not simply have the funds to acquire otherwise. So that is already an important step to make sure that the divide, the knowledge divide between the have and the have not countries is not too deep and something can be done to bridge it. But there's more. The idea is that essentially scientific knowledge should be available for free. Scientists publish it for free, they don't get the fee, they don't get the honorarium for their scientific or scholarly articles, so why should it be so expensive to actually have this material available? Well I was just, I happened to be surfing on the internet before coming to join you to look at things about libraries and I saw an element where somebody was telling us all about this idea and a particular gentleman who is if you like lobbying the world for free access to scientific research information. And there was a big title on the screen, a very sort of very modern presentation you see with multi-colored different scripts, different sizes of letters, pictures on the side and so forth. There was a picture of the gentleman promoting this and in big fat yellow letters on a bright blue background it said. The next step in advancement is pubic science, B-U-B-I-C. Now I like that because it was a part of the human anatomy, I didn't know, had a special branch of science devoted to it. But what it did show is that the automatic programs that we have for spell checking, a great blessing of course to those who are absent minded and so on or who never learned their spelling when they were young, that happens too. These automatic programs that check, well they fail us sometimes and when they fail they fail dramatically because both of these words, the one with an L and the one without, both are part of the English language except not really quite in that particular context. Be that as it may, misspelled or smelled correctly, I do think that free availability of information of course is the way of tomorrow and research information except for patented things, commercial information that is commercially valuable. There always will be exceptions of things that are not available to everybody and his dog and his cat and his canary, but the idea that research results that are published without a fee and that are being read actually without a fee to the authors of those who produced the knowledge, that should be the case and I'm sorry to say then publishers of scientific journals and even possibly publishers of textbooks may have to change their line of business if this trend continues. But what I would hope that whatever the, if you like, the medium by which the message is transmitted in terms of general research information that there always will be the book as an object of beauty, an object that you can sort of enjoy it actually especially if it is a beautiful edition. I love editions on fine paper and leather bound, there's Jean Bonneau on Rue du Faubour, Saint-Honoré in Paris, who has lovely French classics on very special paper and bound and leather, that sort of thing. And of course you have those people who will be collecting first editions, I have never understood why modern books in first editions were collectable, but that's obviously, I'm missing something very serious here. But there always will be books that physically by their essence, by what they feel, what they look like that you will be wanting to own in your home and yes you will be putting them on your shelf and even if they gather dust for a while you will be going back to them. And I hope that you as people involved in the distribution and the availability of knowledge that your noble mission will continue to inspire you because believe you me librarians and anybody involved in the transmission of knowledge to my mind give pleasure to an awful lot of people. I was very frustrated as a little girl of four when my parents did not want to give me a library card, they thought it was not healthy for a child to have one. But I hope that you, in everything that you do, you will remember this, there's this vast public out there who want to know things and who would enjoy knowing things. And there's a vast also public, not just living authors today, but generations and generations through the centuries all the way back to the first recorded writings that we have available and that did survive things like the fire of the library of Alexandria. And that this process of interaction will continue and yes that libraries as places where human beings come together, being social animals you see, I think even sitting next to somebody at their computer screen is a step better from never seeing anybody at all and living only with your computer. I think that the interaction between human beings will remain a spot of libraries and I'm sure that you will have wonderful innovative ideas about how to attract the public to these new spaces which are changing with the years and no doubt will change in the future and you will be there at the helm and I wish you luck for it. The president has indicated that she would be willing to listen to one or two questions so if colleagues in the room have questions please raise your hand and we'll try and get a microphone to you so you can pose your question. So don't be shy, who's going to be first? Well maybe I could take chairs privilege and ask the first question. Madam resident it was obvious from your talk how much you value the book as a physical object and journals as physical objects. If you were to be asked what the shape of a library in 20 years time would be, what would your vision of a library in 20 years time be? I just saw this morning a picture of I think a technical university in Texas which has become a bookless library and there's a picture of somebody sitting at a computer screen with all these empty shelves sitting behind them and to tell you the truth it looks absolutely repulsive. But I suppose that once you remove the empty shelves you could make constructive and creative use of the space liberated in that manner and once the customers if you like the users of a library acquire the skills necessary to access the information that used to be on the shelves it will be fine. The interesting thing is that about the need of a presence in the library with electronic books of course there's no need to be anywhere. You could be on the moon and you could be reading a Kindle book or whatever. That mobility that is now available with the new ever since these miniaturized transistors were invented it means that hopefully one doesn't read a book while driving a car. That's as one talks on the mobile telephone but the flexibility of taking a thing somewhere if you have your particular telephone, your iPhone you could sort of I suppose sit in a conference and read a novel even as you sit there right? Time for one more question. Anya Schmidt who has bravely put her hand up in the middle of the room. So if you get a microphone to Anya, Anya over to you. First of all thank you very much for a very inspiring opening address. You touched in your speech on open access and you said that it was very valuable in your eyes to developing countries. Do you also see an added value for developed countries in open access? Some believe that open access also has an economic value for example. Do you have any ideas on that open access for developed countries? I do believe that what we've been seeing in the last couple of decades has been a progressive greater availability of materials. The scandals that we've had about revealing various types of information that used to be considered as confidential at the very least if not secret. All these points in the direction of information flow that is a bit like a river in flood and that is becoming more and more difficult to channel into the usual channels that we were familiar with. But I think the challenge for the developed world with all this technology is to keep young children and young people continually interested in the written word. I mean pictures are fine and moving things are fine but the living word whether written or spoken I think is a very crucial. I talked to many parents who complain for instance one lady says to me I have a girl who reads voraciously and she's at the top of her class and doing extremely well at school but I have a boy who's maybe slightly dyslexic and he hates reading. Obviously it's having an effect on his school career. I think what we will be needing in the future is to guide small children and youngsters through the labyrinths of technological availabilities and possibilities to make sure that they do not lose their footing, that they are not drowned in trash, in spam. In advertising, in political manipulation and brainwashing and so on and so on. I haven't addressed really all these negative sides of information but I'm sure that you are aware how multitudinous they are all around as we are swamped and buried in them in many ways. To find our way through this jungle to really find our footing I think that will be the task of families of schools and of libraries also. Ladies and gentlemen, time is pressing and we need to move to the first plenary session of the conference but before we do that could I ask you once again to show your appreciation for all our speakers this afternoon in their custom way.