Based at the Amsterdam Public Library, the Netherlands, TWIL has a weekly ‘vimeo’ post on library matters with an international flavor: http://www.thisweekinlibraries.com/

The latest TWIL offering is TWIL#15, an interview with Dr Stuart Hamilton, IFLA’s Senior Policy Adviser.  It can be viewed at: http://www.thisweekinlibraries.com/?p=115

Stuart is a British librarian who worked in public libraries in the South of England, then went to London to do his MLS.  For his master’s thesis he visited Cuba and to study the Independent Libraries movement there. Then he worked for IFLA’s Free Access to Information and Freedom of Expression (FAIFE) office in Copenhagen, Denmark. While there, he obtained a PhD at the Royal Danish School of Librarianship and Information Science. His dissertation was on barriers to access to information on the Internet.  He then took a ‘sabbatical’ and spent the best part of 18 months walking across the USA from east to west, in the process visiting over 100 libraries and even more bars. He has a gift for making friends and drawing out people, and had a great, sometimes hilarious, time in the US.

In the interview Stuart discusses IFLA’s policy work in the areas of freedom of access to information and intellectual property issues, about cuts to library funding in the UK, library volunteers, IFLA-ALP library development projects, and the the upcoming IFLA Congress (Gothenburg, Sweden, 2010). Although we get to see one of his walking shoes, unfortunately he doesn’t really get to talk about his long walk on this show.

It’s a long video. The interviewer burbles and mumbles a lot. Fast-forward a bit to get to the actual interview.  Enjoy!