Pete Bombacii, founder/CEO of Genwell.ca, speaking to the room at MetLib Photo courtesy of Genwell.ca

With worthwhile conferences and events to attend every year, a professional development and conference calendar can fill up quickly and swallow a training and travel budget even faster. However, for those working in large urban public libraries, one important—but perhaps lesser known—annual public library conference should be seriously considered for attendance and involvement.

Every year, the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) – Metropolitan Libraries Section (IFLA-MLS) holds its annual conference and networking event, known as MetLib, where global public library directors, managers, and thought leaders come together for almost a week of intense learning, intimate peer networking, and best practices sharing. With a history dating back to 1967, IFLA’s Metropolitan Libraries Section supports and promotes the improvement of urban public libraries serving municipalities with a population of over 400,000.

It’s a shame that this conference is not better known in the United States. Running a large urban public library today comes with myriad challenging issues, and an opportunity to learn and discuss similar problems and innovative solutions with a large group of fellow global practitioners should be embraced and supported in the United States.

This year’s MetLib was held from October 4–9 in Toronto, where Toronto Public Library (TPL) hosted urban public library leaders from across six continents. Unlike previous MetLib events where participants presented on a wide array of urban library flagship projects and programs, this year organizers settled on one overarching conference theme: From Isolation to Social Connection: Libraries and Well-being, a clarion call for all urban public libraries to tackle the issues of increased social isolation and a lack of social connection, and envision how to enhance civic engagement among urban dwellers around the world.

This is not an issue that has come about recently and surprised us all in the library world. Twenty-five years ago, political scientist Robert D. Putnam first brought the issue to national attention in Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital, and since then, discussing how public libraries can help reverse this trend has been a part of our professional dialogue.

“People may go to the library looking mainly for information, but they find each other there,” wrote and Putnam and Lewis Feldstein in Better Together: Restoring the American Community .

This year’s MetLib speakers and presenters hammered home that urban public libraries across the globe are in a unique and effective position to move the needle among the socially isolated within their communities. Even small projects and traditional programming can help—at the same time demonstrating libraries’ enduring value and relevance, reaching far beyond traditional statistical reporting measures such as the number of visits and books circulated or the economic impact of dollars and cents to the bottom line.

Toronto was recently given the distinction of being the “loneliest city in Canada.” Working with the City of Toronto, along with other local organizational partners and subject matter experts, TPL has stepped into the arena to leverage its reach and attempt to reverse this overall trend. The first step was to measure the library’s programs and services and their actual social impact in some meaningful way. TPL partnered with the Danish firm Seismonaut, which created an innovative new methodology called the “Experience Impact Compass.” (More information can be found at TPL’s report “Enabling Torontonians to Grow and Thrive: Measuring the Social Impact of Toronto Public Library.”)

“We need to stand for what our main mandate is…bringing communities together,” wrote TPL CEO Moe Hosseini-Ara.

From this new framework, major decisions on resources for programs, spaces, collections, staff, and more can now be more strategically attached to the overall social impact on the community. One of the highlighted TPL partnerships was with a national organization, Genwell, that is dedicated to spreading the importance of face-to-face social connections as a proactive step that all can take to improve their health and happiness, or the health and happiness of others and society as a whole; it doesn’t take much for any of us to reach out to someone who may be experiencing a level of social isolation.

SPONSOR SUPPORT

It was also encouraging to spot a small number of corporate conference sponsors at their tables, including BiblioCommons, Counting Opinions, DeMarque, OverDrive, and Bibliotheca. More of the industry’s corporate vendors and partners should be made aware of, and participate in, the opportunity to support and learn from this gathering of global library leaders moving the profession forward.

"MetLib brings together people leading libraries in cities around the world,” Bibliotheca CEO Matthew Bellamy told LJ. “As a company that partners closely with urban libraries globally, we are proud to support a network that works every day to make libraries more accessible, inclusive, and connected.”

METLIB LEARNING CIRCLE IN COLOMBIA

Another key component of this year’s MetLib gathering was highlighting one of IFLA–MLS’s main organizational initiatives, the MetLib Learning Circle. This is a new global urban library leadership and professional development program offering participants from large metropolitan libraries the opportunity to engage in a global peer learning and collaboration network. This network of library practitioners helps facilitate and improve innovative project development at local levels. The growing program currently boasts participants from 27 cities across 12 countries.

One of the more striking Learning Circle projects is going on at the Bogotá Library System, Colombia: Common Library Projects: A Collaborative Outreach Strategy Between Public and Community Libraries in Bogotá. Bogotá has a significant shortage of public libraries in relation to its urban population—only 31 for a population of over 9.5 million citizens. To fill this gap, 245 community citizen-led libraries have sprung up, especially in marginalized areas. The question of how the public library can develop an effective outreach strategy to collaborate in this type of unique landscape is now being tackled by a group of engaged professionals on a global scale to grow this program for the future.

Social isolation and lack of civic engagement are worsening problems. So consider the gauntlet officially thrown by this year’s IFLA–MetLib conference as to how your library is leveraging programs, space, and collections to help those in your communities get out of the shadows and engaged with each other to be more healthy and happy.

See you at next year’s MetLib in the Netherlands, hosted by the Utrecht Public Library.

Jason LeDuc is a Library Consultant and LJ contributor.