EMEA Regional Council Third Annual Meeting—2012
Birmingham, United Kingdom
Robin Green, Chair, OCLC EMEA Regional Council and Vice Chair, EMEARC Executive Committee
On 28 and 29 February 2012 OCLC's Europe, Middle East and Africa Regional Council (EMEARC) will hold its Member Meeting in the Town Hall and Council House in the city of Birmingham, UK.
This is EMEARC's third Member Meeting. The first two, held in the Netherlands and Germany, attracted participants from throughout the Region who came together to hear about and discuss topics from cloud computing and augmented reality to resource sharing and digitisation of special collections.
The title of this year's meeting, 'Developing a New Blend of Library,' has been chosen to reflect how libraries and other cultural heritage organisations are blending physical and digital 'space' to reach out to their communities with new types of service. This is fittingly set against the backdrop of construction work on what will be Birmingham's splendid new central library - and a 'Virtual Library of Birmingham' already exists to support and complement the physical building.
The Meeting assembles a range of keynote speakers and sessions from across our region to respond to and explore this theme, and for the first time we will be hosting a Pecha Kucha session, inviting members to present their innovations in a particular area of their service provision where they are engaging OCLC in the process.
The importance of our annual Regional Meeting is that it provides a place - a space - for OCLC Members and others across the EMEA Region to come together. This is a wonderful opportunity: let's not forget that the Europe, Middle East and Africa Region, one of three Regions in the OCLC global cooperative, includes around 2000 Member institutions and 7000 organisations using OCLC services.
The Regional Meeting gives this rich and diverse community the opportunity to exchange views and experiences, to broaden our perspectives, and even to identify unexpected partners with shared interests to undertake joint activity. For me, these are key purposes of the (still new) EMEA and other Regional Councils. They inform our broader role within OCLC, which in addition to promoting the cooperative is to represent the Region within OCLC's Global Council and to advise OCLC on strategic and service developments that will support our Members.
There is also a two-fold challenge for us: first to recognise and encompass within our Meeting and in developing our Regional Council the wide geographical, cultural and language differences that characterise our Region, and second to maintain our Members' awareness of their Regional Council outside this annual meeting, and of the collective voice it gives them in developing the OCLC Cooperative.
We will be addressing these issues in the coming year and beyond. Just as our Meeting in Birmingham will discuss how our organisations are blending physical and digital environments to reach out to their communities, our theme for this year's activity within the Regional Council is 'Reaching Out' to our Members - we hope you will join us in Birmingham and that you will be encouraged to engage in other ways with your Regional Council.
—Robin Green, Chair, EMEA Regional Council
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