Gordana Stokić Simončić
Bel grade University
Faculty of Philology - Library and Information Science Department
gordana.stokic.simoncic@gmail.com

Branka Dragosavac
Belgrade University, Faculty of Law - Library
branka.dragosavac@ius.bg.ac.rs

doi: 10.19090/cit.2019.35.44-53
No. 35 (November 2019), p. 44-53

International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions – IFLA
and Professional Associations in Serbia: The First 45 Years

Summary

This work brings to life some new facts and presents the cooperation between the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) and the associations of librarians in Serbia, in four and a half decades, between 1931 and 1976. In the period between the two world wars, this cooperation was established and maintained by the Yugoslav Library Association (1931–1940), especially its Belgrade Section, and after the Second World War it was realized through the Serbian Library Association (1948–1976) as a part of the Association of Librarians in Yugoslavia.
Yugoslavia, in the fi rst period as a kingdom, and in the second as a socialist country, represents a state-legal framework to examine the phenomena of library associations and international cooperation. The Yugoslav Library Association was the predecessor of the Serbian Library Association, but under the new conditions of socialist construction, mentioning the organization from the previous, bourgeois period was undesirable. Nine years of the activity of the fi rst professional library association in Yugoslavia were not evaluated in the right way: association that was founded later with the vast majority of former members and historians of librarianship, talked rarely about its existence, mainly for the political reasons.
Considering knowledge of the development of librarianship in national frameworks the basis for building a professional identity of librarians, the authors of this paper are trying to shed light on cooperation with IFLA as essential for maturing of the professional self-awareness. Taking into account that economic opportunities and political infl uences in the past decades have made this process diffi cult, the authors are trying to oppose their shared memory, common values, the feeling of belonging and self-respect as an identity property. Moreover, nowadays in Serbia there is a strong need for re-evaluation of the role and importance of library associations in order to reposition the profession, interrelations of professionals and modalities of voluntary work.

Keywords:

librarians, professional associations, cooperation, Yugoslav Library Association (1931–1940), Serbian Library Association (1947– ), International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA)

Submitted: 16th October 2019
Accepted for publication: 29th October 2019

International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions – IFLA and Professional Associations in Serbia: The First 45 Years by Gordana Stokić Simončić, Branka Dragosavac is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Full text