We toured the ALA office on May 31 and had presentation about the ALA and the future library.

American Library Association(ALA) is the oldest and largest library association in the world. It founded 1876, and the mission of ALA is “to provide leadership for the development, promotion and improvement of library and information services and the profession of librarianship to enhance learning and ensure access to information for all”

There are 270 employees at ALA and 65,000 members of all over the world have joined the ALA. Their core values are (1) Advocacy, (2) Information policy, (3) Professional & Leadership Development, (4) Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.

The Most impressive thing was “Future of Libraries”.

ALA identify emerging trends relevant to libraries and the communities and share the information to library staff and the public.

They have added new trends to the collection (Blockchain, Creative Placemaking, Smart Cities, Virtual Reality, and Voice Control) and have continued to promote the availability of those new trends in the e-mail newsletter.

I think it is really good tools for catching up the new trends about library and technologies and preparing for the future.

In the National library of korea, We also scrap the news about current issues of libraries daily and share the information to the staff by emailing newsletter.

But, we do not have any collection like this.

I want to propose to create collection of new trends more professionally. It is important to know what’s happening in the world and what do people like these days.