English Speaking Librarians Club

I want to say thank you to everyone that came out tonight to the English Speaking Librarians Club. It was also a pleasure to have a few non-librarians join us as well since their perspective is important. We had a very interesting discussion about challenges facing libraries in Ukraine today. Among the chief concerns discussed this evening were the following:

• The ever increasing price of materials and especially foreign language materials
• Lack of budget/funding (for materials, for training, etc.)
• Poor facilities (buildings and surrounding areas)
• Copyright – unclear and restrictive in the area of what can be placed online, for example rare illustrated children’s books from the 1920s
• Training for librarians especially in the area of technology
• Library education and the lack of students entering this discipline
• Limited patron access to the Internet
• Lack of government support

We also talked about the American Library Association’s Advocacy website and printed articles that suggested hints for arguing for larger budgets.

It was a constructive conversation and opened up further discussion among colleagues about how their own situations were similar or differed from each other.