Friday, December 12th at 4:30pm we invite you to the American Library for a presentation entitled, "Ten Tips for Lobbying," which will focus on the subject of lobbying as it relates to libraries. The speaker, Nancy Bolt from the US, is an IREX consultant, a librarian by training, and a member of the American Library Association (ALA).

Unfortunately my time in Kyiv is quickly coming to an end, I am sad to say my Fulbright grant ends June 30th and soon I will return to the US. Thank you to the club members for making me feel welcome. I have enjoyed our meetings and hearing about your libraries.

My time spent visiting Ukrainian libraries has been facinating and I look forward to returning in the future. A short summary of my impressions of Ukrainian librarianship entitled, "Ukrainian Libraries through the Eyes of an American Librarian" is available online in the June issue of International Leads, an American Libraries Association publication.

A special thanks to Nadiya Strishenets and Hanna Voskrenska for sharing information and supporting my project!

During the last club meeting, members who attended the Sudak conference shared their impressions. The international conference entitled, Libraries and Information Resources in the Modern World of Science, Culture, Education, and Business took place in Crimea from June 7 to 15. Approximately 2,000 librarians, publishers, and other professionals attended the conference. Given the scale of this conference, it was extremely well planned and managed. Most attendees are Russian or Ukrainian but the conference also attracted participants from a number of countries including China, Jordan, Germany, USA and Turkey. Pictured here: Hanna and Sasha on the shore. Igor and Sue in front of marching band a few minutes before the opening ceremony.

Upcoming Meeting!

Please join us June 18th at 4pm at the American Library of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.

Thank you to Laura Kaspari Hohmann for giving a presentation on Information Literacy. It was especially fun to view the video entitled Library Mystery Tour. Created by Williams College Libraries, Library Mystery Tour is a game which serves to familiarize users with library services and to reinforce the idea that librarians are available to assist.

Upcoming Meeting!

Please join us in the NaUKMA American Library on May 14th at 4:00pm. Ms.Laura Kaspari Hohmann, Information Specialist from the State Department will make a presentation on "Teaching Information Literacy". Laura gave a presentation for us last year on Web 2.0 Technology. UNESCO pays close attention to information literacy issues. It is very important and interesting topic! Hope to see you all!

Tonight's meeting with Ellie Valentine was great fun. Not only that, but we had a constructive information exchange. Ellie spoke about her projects in Armenia and Pakistan. Each club member spoke about his or her recent past /current projects as well. Below are a few highlights from the meeting.

Igor had mentioned that his library is now using Ask a Librarian to answer remote reference questions (mostly coming from students who need help with homework or tests).

Ellie mentioned she had been working with an open source online library system called KOHA. And that the system itself is quite flexible and easy to use with modules for aquisitions, circulation and patron records etc., but the aspect of the project which was more time consuming was cleaning up data exported from an old DOS system into KOHA.

Nadiya mentioned that there has been a major change in the process of procurement (not only for libraries), which is positive.

Svetlana spoke about web based resources available to librarians on the topic of librarianship through the National Parliamentary Library.

Olena Z. spoke about meeting user's needs by finding artilces using electronic databases. The National Medical library subscribes to EBSCO, but does not unfortunately have access to Elsevier. Users can use Elsevier at Vernadsky National Scientific Library.

Yaroslava spoke about the IREX Global Libraries project. For those who do not know, the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) is planning a strategy to provide public access to computers and Internet in Ukraine’s public libraries.

Yaroslava also mentioned she had recently met with Ukrainian Embassy staff in Iran and they are looking for opportunities for book exchanges. There is a community of Ukrainian speakers in Iran, but a shortage of Ukrainian language books.

And last but not least, we spoke about the upcoming IFLA conference to take place in Quebec, Canada August 10-14.

Please feel free to leave comments or questions, especially notes about other interesting items which we discussed.