By CHARLYNN SPENCER PYNE
Associate Librarian for Library Services Winston Tabb was elected chairman of the IFLA Professional Committee at the 67th Council and General Conference of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), held in Boston from Aug. 16 to 25.
In this office, Mr. Tabb also serves on the IFLA Governing Board and its six-member Executive Committee.
Under a new governance structure that took effect at the close of the Boston conference, the nine-member Professional Committee directs and monitors the planning and programming of IFLA's professional activities, which are carried out through five Core Programs, eight divisions, 33 sections, 12 roundtables and numerous discussion groups. The 21-member Governing Board is responsible for the organization's general policies, management, finance and external communications. The board is managed by a six-member IFLA Executive Committee that includes IFLA's president, president-elect, treasurer and the chairman of its Professional Committee.
Mr. Tabb was chief of the Library's Loan Division when he first attended an IFLA conference in Paris in 1989. During that conference, he was elected secretary of the Standing Committee on Document Delivery and Interlending. Since that time, he has continued to play an active and critical role in the development and leadership of IFLA. Most recently, Mr. Tabb chaired the section on National Libraries and the IFLA division that includes all national, parliamentary, university and general research libraries. He is also the Library of Congress representative to the Conference of Directors of National Libraries held in conjunction with the IFLA conference.
Another key player in IFLA is Sally McCallum, chief of the Network Development and MARC Standards Office, who is one of only 10 members elected to the IFLA Governing Board. An internationally recognized authority on MARC (machine-readable cataloging), Ms. McCallum attended IFLA meetings during the 1980s to give presentations, but first attended as a delegate in 1989 in Paris. Since that time she has continued to serve on the Technology Standing Committee and has chaired the committee for a number of years. Ms. McCallum also chaired the Division Six (Management and Technology) Coordinating Board and has served in numerous working groups and committees concerned with formats, authority files and digital topics. For the last two conferences, she has convened a popular discussion group on Unicode, an encoding standard that enables computers to store, exchange and display characters in every script, including punctuation and typographic symbols. Ms. McCallum served on the IFLA Professional Board for six years, chairing it the last two, and on the Executive Committee, for which she played a formative role in revising the IFLA statutes.
Nancy Davenport, the Library's director for Acquisitions, first attended IFLA in 1993 in Barcelona, Spain. At that time she was serving in the Congressional Research Service and delivered a paper to the Parliamentary Libraries Section. Appointed director for Acquisitions in December 1997, Ms. Davenport was selected by the Library to serve on IFLA's Section on Acquisitions and Collection Development and has attended the annual conferences since 1998. Before her recent election as chair of the Section on Acquisitions and Collection Development, she moderated several large programs and served as coordinating indexer of a section publication on acquisitions and collections development.
Barbara Tillett, chief of the Cataloging Policy and Support Office, first attended IFLA in 1987, in Brighton, England, where she spoke on bibliographic relationships. She also spoke to the Section on Cataloging at the Paris meeting in 1989. From 1992 to 1997, Ms. Tillett served as a consultant to the IFLA Study Group on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records and helped write the final report. She became the ALA/ALCTS representative to the IFLA Standing Committee Section on Cataloging in 1994 and will complete her second term in 2003. At the Boston conference, Ms. Tillett was reelected chair of the Section on Cataloging and elected secretary to the Division IV (Bibliographic Control) Coordinating Board. She has also served on and chaired numerous working groups and delivered papers on a host of topics.
Ms. Pyne is a network specialist in the Network Development and MARC Standards Office.