Continuing my reports from the IFLA/ World Library and Information Conference taking place in Milan, Italy and specifically giving the 2nd report on yesterday’s session organised jointly by the Information Literacy and Literacy & Reading Sections of IFLA. I took shorter notes than for the 1st section: basically the whole session was 3 and quarter hours with no coffee breaks and although there were NO draggy bits and time flew by, I think my brain and fingers were tiring after a while. As before, the full papers are online and I have linked to them through the paper titles.First talk in 2nd segment was from Saiquil Islam (BRAC, Bangladesh), talking about Community Learning Centre (CLC): Developing a learning society in Bangladesh. Literacy rate in Bangladesh is 47% and net enrolment is in secondary schools is 53%. There are ess than 100 public libraries for 144 million people. There is an information divide between urban/rural, rich/poor, women/men, and access to internet is not common. BRAC (Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee ) has 121,000 staff and covers programmes in Education, health, social empowerment, and legal empowerment. It launched CLCs in 1995 and they are multipurpose: for example mobile library (in a rickshaw), children’s corner, skill traing and socio-cultural activities. The community itself has to contribute to found them and keep them going, and there are now 2,170 CLCs (so by far outnumbering conventional libraries). All the librarians are women, which is a valuable new role for females in rural areas, and 1m people outside previous library catchment are being reached, about half women. This shows that the community is willing to support these needs, but not yet enough, because this still only covers a minority of the population. …

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