I agree with Nemo and Dominic.

[sorry, this is long and just my 2 cents]

Few years ago, we started working with museums because of some proactive Wikipedians and chapters
saw a void which needed to be filled: Liam, Lori, Sarah, Kippelboy and many others had competences and interest in bridging the
gap between Wikimedia projects and museums. They did (and are doing) good, interest is spreading, and now there are success cases, history, experience: we're building an infrastructure.

I think that the world of libraries is gonna be next, but I see a lot of issues too:
libraries are in the middle of a disruption, the Internet has been really "though" on them.
Librarians need to shift and adapt to survive (as a profession) an so do libraries themselves. (if you want to read something (I didn't) --> David Lankes "Atlas of New Librarianship")
Moreover, there is the ebook issue, and all the changes and consequence it will cause.

In this sense, as many other profession, I think that (statistically) librarians see Wikipedia more as a threat than an opportunity
(I see a pattern here :-), and in my personal experience they are really interested in understanding it better,
but often they do lack the skills.

I'm not a librarian and I'm not sure which kind of partnership could be organized with libraries:
I can imagine workshops and lessons for librarians (we did it with Wikimedia Italia few years ago), or for patrons,
and digitization patnerships for uploading books on Wikisource (as Wikimedia France did with Gallica).

A more complex relationship is yet to be build (and thought),
but we can ask our librarian Phoebe for some insights :-)

For IFLA, we have contact (I personally do),
but we should think very well waht to say and propose them.
Right now, I don't know.

Aubrey

2012/5/15 Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki@gmail.com>
I think IFLA loves us, we have many friends there. Not many wikimedians attend it becaus it's very expensive, but some wikimedians volunteered in it (Aubrey for instance, when it's been in Milan; I think he's not been able to speak although he tried?). If you can get access you're lucky and you shouldn't miss the opportunity.
On the other hand, at least in Italy we regularly attend free librarians and publishers events (it's particularly easy in Milan, where most of the publishing world and of Italian wikimedians are).

Nemo

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