At the moment, the IFLA conference begins at Milano in Italy. Please read IFLA Express, the daily newspaper reporting from the conference.
Last week a couple of satellite conferences took place at Florence, for example the meeting “Emerging trends in technology: libraries between Web 2.0, semantic web and search technology”. The german librarian weblog “Librarians are uncool” is reporting in Enlish from Milano. And if you want to search for reactions in “real time” just use the Twitter search with the keyword “ifla2009″.

Its now for the tenth year, that the library ranking for Germany is made for the Public Libraries and the sixth, that Scientific Libraries are ranked. The Label of this ranking is “Bibliotheksindex” or BIX, an its a instrument, that is made on the fundament of many indicators. The libraries are sorted in types (relating to Scientific Libraries) or population of town (Public Libraries). But I must’nt say much about the instrument, because the coordinator of the organizations, that are maintaining the BIX, the Kompetenznetzwerk, has written an introduction to BIX on eleven pages as PDF-File.

Dale S. Askey is Web Development Librarian of K-State Libraries in Kansas. At the moment, he is Visiting professor, electronic publishing and multimedia at the Hochschule für Wirtschaft, Technik und Kultur, Leipzig, Germany. Now he blogs at “Eintauchen” (= dunking) about his experiences in Germany and in german librarianship. But he still has relations to german librarianship, for example he is member of the advisory board of the leading library magazine “BuB – Forum for Library and Information”.

Yesterday and today, the second bibcamp in Germany took place in Stuttgart. On the platform of the unconference you can find a documentation of the several reports on twitter, blogs and of photos. 40 – 50 library 2.0-activists participated at the conference and discussed applications, programs, strategies and possibilities under the different circumstances. For example, mobile services are in the U.S.A. common. In Germany we are in the beginnings to customize our services to end user applications like hand helds, PDAs and other. Because of this, it was a good announcement, that the dean of LIS faculty of the “Hochschule der Medien” (Stuttgart Univ. of Applied Sciences in Media) said, that in autumn a new Bachelor (of Sc.) degree programme will be implemented on the field of “Mobile Media”
The next bibcamp will be at 2010 in Hannover!

In one week the second Bibcamp will take place in Stuttgart. The ca. 50 participants will create a programme of their own. Just consult the social forum of the Bibcamp (in German) to see members and themes.

The use of Twitter, a well known microblogging service, spreads around the library 2.0 community in Germany. Several colleagues and libraries and even organizations are twittering about their work and leisure. So, if you are curious, what german librarians have to say in short, you can find an overview (still growing) at a page of LIS Wiki. Even a librarian association, the Berufsverband Information Bibliothek, has a twitter account.

Stuart Hamilton, Senior Policy Advisor of IFLA Headquarts, wrote in his Blog February 18th ff. over the Third IFLA Presidential Meeting at Berlin. The conference programme was entitled ‘Access to Knowledge: Networking Libraries’.

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Since the presidency of Mrs. Claudia Lux 2007-2009 three Presidential Meetings are held (No. 1-2) and planned (No. 3 in 2009). The third will be at 19/20th february 2009 and the program is published yet under the title “Access to Knowledge: Networking Libraries.
The Presidential Meetings are well documented, even if its noted in German, the keynotes are in English.

Are you searching for scientific institutions in Germany? Now the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and Deutscher Akademischer Auslandsdienst (DAAD) have introduced a database of scientific institutiones in Germany with the title Research Explorer. Search is very easy,  with either subject or geographic or combined search.