Interview with Laurel Dryden, Acting Chief, Bureau of Library and Information Services, International Labour Office, Geneva, by JP Accart
How large is your staff, and how many of
them are librarians?
We have 22 permanent staff: 13 assistants (library assistants, finance
clerk, IT assistant, and secretary), 8 professional librarians and 1 professional
IT staff. We also employ 5 external collaborators on a more or less permanent
basis to do indexing for our database
Labordoc. We normally have some temporary staff and at least 1 intern. At the
moment we have 2 interns and 3 short-term staff.
Our 22 permanent staff members
cover 17 different nationalities. The ILO
employ s 2,733 people – of whom approximately 1,000 are in Geneva. The rest work in ILO offices throughout the
world (there are 51 ILO field offices).
Although 40 of the field offices employ information specialists, very few of
the specialists have formal information
science qualifications or work full time
on information tasks. Usually their
work assignments are a mixture of communications, publications and information work.
As the information centres are not
under my direct responsibility, I have
created an ILO Global Information Network to strengthen the ILO’s information services and the dissemination of
ILO published knowledge. Working
through the Network, the ILO Library
can coordinate information work, ensure that information standards are
adhered to, and help all ILO staff to get
the high-quality information services
they need. All of the information specialists in the field offices are members
of the Network. We publish a regular
newsletter and hold regular workshops
to help them upgrade their skills, keep
them abreast of the information developments in the ILO, and to provide a
forum where they can exchange ideas
and meet their counterparts. I am a very
strong believer in the power of knowledge sharing and the Network operates
on that principle.
What are your main projects, what do you
want to develop?
One of the main objectives of the
ILO Library, and the ILO Global Information Network, is to promote ILO
knowledge – and, by extension, ILO values and concerns – which we do in
various ways.
The ILO’s database Labordoc www.oit.org/labordoc or www.ilo.org/labordoc is one way. Although managing
information through Labordoc is part
of our routine work, it is still a major
project of the ILO Library. Labordoc
contains a huge wealth of knowledge
which I want to exploit to the maximum. Developments in IT are providing us with new ways of doing that, and
I am very keen to explore how we can
use these developments to promote ILO
knowledge more widely, more interestingly, and in a more user-friendly manner.
One important step we are currently taking is to merge all the ILO field
library databases into Labordoc. By early 2010 most of the information specialists in the field will catalogue directly
into Labordoc. Labordoc will provide a
single access point to ILO and non-ILO
knowledge on the world of work – finally, anyone who wants to find out
what the ILO has published or collected
on the world of work will only need to
search one database.
Another way we promote ILO
knowledge is by having an “open door”
policy towards external users. Anyone
can use the ILO Library – either by
searching Labordoc (which also provides access to about 60,000 online
publications), as a walk-in client, or by
sending an e-mail to request information (the Library’s website, see www.oit.org/bibliotheque, www.ilo.org/library,
includes an “Ask a librarian” link so that
clients can contact us easily). About one
third of the work we do is in response
to questions from external users.
Through our partner or depository
libraries programme many libraries
around the world receive ILO publications for free. One of our projects in
2010 will be to make sure that we have
the best selection of relevant libraries.
As an extension of this idea, I encourage our information specialists in the
field to offer information sessions on
ILO knowledge products – especially
the online products – to universities or
relevant research institutions, and we
are now developing brochures and online presentations to help them with
this work.
And, finally, we also publish online
information products such as resource
guides on topics which highlight the
ILO’s values and concerns. This year the
ILO celebrated 90 years and to celebrate
that the ILO Library produced a web-
based Chronology (www.oit.org/histoire
or www.ilo.org/history) which recounts
the major events in the ILO’s history and
links to the full text of the key documents
and photos, and to possible videos that
are related to each event.
Our biggest project this year was to
develop the ILO Global Job Crisis Observatory www.ilo.org/jobcrisis.
This has been a huge undertaking
which combines the traditional skills of
librarians (finding and organizing information and providing easy access to information) with newer skills (e.g. web
design, web publishing, editing, communication skills). The site provides a
weekly alert service of the latest news
and reports on the jobs crisis (we select
the best resources for each week), feature articles by ILO officials (we work
with ILO technical units to encourage
staff members to write for the Observatory) and resource guides on how decision makers can recover from the jobs
crisis. As well, we produce a fuller internal news alert service for ILO staff.
Another big project which will be
completed this year is the digitization
of all ILO published knowledge. Once
we have finished the project we will
start producing digital (multimedia) libraries as another way of making ILO
knowledge more visible.
And in addition to the development
and maintenance of more knowledge
products, we are currently looking at
how to improve the interface of Labordoc – and especially how we can do this
by using open source software.
