AMBAC (Asociacio'n Mexicana de Bibliotecarios, Asociacio'n Civil) held their 28th Annual Jornadas Mexicanas de Biblioteconomi'a from April 30 through May 2. AMBAC is Mexico's oldest library association, founded in 1924, and is Mexico's equivalent to ALA. The Jornadas are traditionally held on these dates because of the Cinco de Mayo (May 5) national holiday in Mexico, so that participants can take advantage of the long weekend to explore the sites where conferences are held. Last year's Jornadas were held in Oaxaca and next year's will probably be in Veracruz.
Mexico has a small, but active, library community: there are fewer than 1,000 working librarians in Mexico and 329 are AMBAC members. Besides the sessions, dozens of ex- hibitors and several workshops also competed for participants' time. About 500 attended the 3-day conference. Librarians, researchers and authors also came from Costa Rica, Colombia, Guatemala, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. Dr. Jesus Lau from the Universidad Auto'noma de Ciudad Jua'rez and I presented a session on TQM in Public Services; I concentrated on Reference Services.
There was also a panel of ten speakers from different library associations: Cesar Caballero represented ALA (American Library Association), Estella Morales represented IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations), Nancy Cunningham represented TLA (Texas Library Association), and I represented REFORMA. Elsa Ramirez, Head of Mexico's Library Science Research Center (known as el CUIB, pronounced "queeb") at the National University of Mexico (UNAM) and the President of AMBAC, was especially pleased to see ALA, TLA and REFORMA highly interested in collaborating in future projects such as exchanges, conferences and research with AMBAC members.
It was quite interesting to see the universality of themes that concern reference librarians in 1997: copyright, library technology, user services, constant change, to mention just a few. For any member of RRT who is moderately fluent in Spanish and would enjoy meeting reference colleagues from Mexico, the Jornadas Mexicanas de Biblioteconomi'a are not to be missed.
by Edward Erazo ederazo@lib.nmsu.edu
New Mexico State University
Return to RRT Newsletter Table of
Contents
Return to RRT homepage