EVALUATION OF IFLA CONFERENCES

Niels Ole Pors, Regional Convenor - Europe

Introduction

As everybody, I guess, knows, the IFLA conference takes place each year. In 1997 it was in Copenhagen; in 1998 in Amsterdam; and this year it will take place in Bangkok.

IFLA decided in 1997 to evaluate the conference through means of both interviews and surveys of the participants. A small group of students and teachers from the Royal School of Library and Information Science undertook the evaluation task. The same group did the evaluation of the Amsterdam conference and they will also evaluate the conference this year in Bangkok.

A report that compares the evaluation of the Copenhagen and Amsterdam conferences has just been finalised. Some of the main results are as follows.

Demographics

The survey population for the 2 years consists of approximately 500 respondents from each year, is a response rate of around 20 %.

40% of respondents named their function or job as a librarian and 32% as library director. Educators also play a significant role in the conferences.

64 % of the delegates are women, and the participants come from nearly 80 countries, dominated by the USA and Western Europe representing over 50 % of the delegates.

As expected, the age of the participants is a bit high - on average. Over 40 % of the delegates represent the age group 45 -65, and in total nearly 70 % are more than 46 years of age.

Approximately 20 % of the delegates were first timers. Those who can be characterised as veterans are delegates who have attended 7 or more IFLA conferences.

Only 20 % of the participants that come to the conferences come just to attend. The majority have some official function as speaker, IFLA-member or member of a standing commitee.

Nearly 90 % of the participants claimed that their language capability in English was excellent or very good.

The results are not surprising. It is well established librarians who tend to attend the conferences.

Satisfaction with the conferences

Of course one of the objectives of the evaluation was to investigate the degree of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the conferences. This is, of course, the meaty part of the evaluation report and it is only possible to give a few of the main results.

Both conferences were judged very positively. An overall impression of the conferences shows that 77 % judged the Copenhagen conference to be excellent or very good. The Amsterdam conference was evaluated even better, with 87 % giving the same marks. Only 1 % judged the conference overall to be poor or very poor.

One of the reasons for the Amsterdam conference receiving a better evaluation than the Copenhagen one, was obviously the location of the conference venue, which in Copenhagen was placed a bit away from the center and with not very convenient transportation.

The quality of the different presentations in a conference is, of course, of paramount interest in an evaluation. Overall one can say that the average participant was not impressed. There is no doubt that the different professional elements in the conference, be it plenary sessions, poster sessions, workshops or round tables, could do with a radical quality improvement. Unless, of course, one is satisfied with judgement of excellence at around 55 - 60 %. Participants found that one of the main problems was the variability in quality of the different presentations.

Many of the other events and services were very well received. It is obvious that participants value the work done by volunteers and they value very highly the different social occasions and arrangements.

Conclusion

This short review cannot do justice to the report and all its findings, but I hope that at least some more results will be published in different IFLA journals. It will also be interesting to see how this years conference in Bangkok will be evaluated by the participants.

Evaluation report: IFLA Conference 1998 compared to 1997. - Charlotte Egholm, Carl Gustav Johannsen and Camilla Moring. Royal School of Library and Information Science. Copenhagen. February 1999. 36 pages.

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