On 5 and 6 November 2025, IFLA Headquarters hosted a group of authors working on chapters for IFLA’s centenary volume, a special monograph to be published by De Gruyter Saur in the IFLA Publications (“greenbacks”) series, to mark the centenary of IFLA’s founding in 1927.
Celebrating 100 Years of IFLA
Organised by the IFLA Library History Special Interest Group, the purpose of the Authors’ Symposium was to give shape to the centenary book as a whole – a book of this nature has to be more coherent than a collection of articles such as one finds in a journal issue.
Some twenty authors from around the world attended in person in a venue made available by the KB (Royal Library), the national library of the Netherlands. Another twenty authors participated online, using Zoom. The programme included an overview of the project, by Steve Witt, on behalf of the editors (Steve Witt, Jeffrey Wilhite, Anna Maria Tammaro, and Peter Lor), a briefing on manuscript guidelines and the publishing process by Debbie Schachter, the editor of the IFLA Publications book series, and a guided visit to the IFLA archives, which are housed in the stacks of the Royal Library, conducted by Louis Tak?cs.
Writing IFLA’s history
This planned volume, of around 27 chapters, will comprise sections on aspects of IFLA’s development, IFLA’s regional and national impact, and IFLA’s global impact. The approach is to be thematic and analytic, rather than chronological and celebratory.
The Symposium agenda was mainly devoted to brief presentations by the chapter authors, who had submitted proposals in response to a call for chapters issued in July 2024. The authors were asked to outline the scope and main thrust of their chapters, and show how their chapter will fit into the structure of the book. They were also invited to indicate any open questions with which they were struggling, and to fellow authors and editors for suggestions and advice. This feedback should help authors as they revise and refine their chapters in line with the editorial guidelines and together create an interesting, well-balanced book.
Given that we had so may chapters to discuss in a programme of two days’ duration, authors were given only ten minutes for their presentation, with a further ten minutes for discussion. This seemed a bit daunting initially, but in the end, good discipline and enthusiastic collaboration won the day. Participants reported that they had had a fruitful and stimulating event.
The authors are now hard at work. Full chapters will be due in April 2026 and the book will be published in 2027.
This video features interviews with a broad range of chapter authors.
Source: https://tr.ee/uK6FPU
