• Index of this issue

No. 68, July 2010

On April 13, 2010, sixteen national library leaders from ten countries gathered at Singapore's National Library Building for the 18th meeting of the Conference of Directors of National Libraries in Asia Oceania (CDNL-AO).

CDNL-AO 2010 participants

The original venue for this meeting had been Islamabad, Pakistan in March 2010, but due to travel restrictions imposed by some governments, the venue was changed to Singapore.

The meeting was co-chaired by Mr Syed Ghour Hussain Sabazwari, Deputy Director of the National Library of Pakistan (NLP), and Ms Ngian Lek Choh, Director of National Library (NL) Singapore.

Among the matters discussed were:

1. The Final Statutes and Rules of Procedure for CDNL-AO were approved. This was an important step ahead to institutionalise the way the Conference is run and funded;
2. The National Library of Korea's Digital Library ("Dibrary") invited participation by other members in its digital library;
3. National Diet Library (NDL) of Japan presented the results of a web-archiving survey among members;
4. National Library of Australia (NLA) gave a presentation on the current status of Resource Description and Access (RDA) standards. The outcome of the current testing will be known in mid-2011. National Library of Thailand agreed to lead a team to negotiate better pricing for emerging national libraries in the region;
5. NDL of Japan announced the launch of the CDNL-AO portal and discussion forums. The various topics under discussion such as web-archiving, RDA, etc would have their own discussion groups. The presentations at the meeting would also be uploaded on the portal, http://www.ndl.go.jp/en/cdnlao/index.html;
6. NLA presented its new discovery service called Trove;
7. The IFLA Statement of Principles on Copyright Exceptions and Limitations for Libraries and Archives were approved;
8. NL Singapore presented a new national project, the Singapore Memory Project.

CDNL-AO Meeting

National Library Board Singapore hosted a welcome dinner for delegates at Sentosa on April 13. A fruitful seminar with the topic "Challenges of Libraries in Asia" was also held on Apr 14 in conjunction with the meeting. The four invited speakers were Mr Dady Rachmananta from National Library of Indonesia; Dr Shin Yong-Eon from National Digital Library of Korea; Dato' Raslin Abu Bakar from National Library of Malaysia; and Mr Syed Ghyour Hussain Sabazwari from NLP. The seminar was well received by the Singapore library community.

The 18th meeting was highly productive despite the short notice given as many outstanding matters were agreed and decisions made. The next meeting would be hosted by Korea on May 23, 2011 and possibly Indonesia in 2012.