The National Conference of ANBPR, organized between October 28-31, 2009 at Lacu Rosu resort in Harghita County, marked 20 years of activity for the National Association of Librarians and Public Libraries in Romania.

The event gather together 150 librarians from all over Romania and has brought into attention the role and responsibilities of ANBPR within the Biblionet Program. Besides active members of the Association at the Conference participated also representatives from other partners and collaborators of the ANBPR, like the Association of Communes from Romania (A.Co.R.), the Ministry of Culture, Religious Affairs and National Heritage and the Association of Prefects. 

An important theme addressed at the Conference was the ANBPR’s members’ presentations of good practices in communication with and between members at the ANBPR’s local branches as well as successful examples of library services.

Besides sharing experience and examples of good practice, the conference offered the opportunity for informing and consulting the associations’ members about the strategic planning process that ANBPR just started 2 months ago. During the Conference the Executive Board with IREX’s help, organized an extensive consultation with the member base, using a questionnaire to get quantitative data and a World Café session, to get qualitative feed-back from the association’s members.

During the ANBPR Café, organized under the title “We are an Association. What’s next?”, the participants were invited to discuss openly in small groups on 5 themes  of major interest for the development of the association:
• Training and professional development needs for ANBPR’s members
• Policy priorities and major problems with local and central authorities that can be addressed by ANBPR
• Organizational development of ANBPR
• Communication with and between members
• Collecting and disseminating good practices

All the ideas collected during the Café’s debates will be corroborated with the data resulted from questionnaires and will help ANBPR to finalize a coherent development strategy for the association, tailored to meet its member base real needs.

As we want to continue the collection of ideas and opinions on this matter, you are invited to further participate in dialogue on our forum at the following subject:  http://www.biblionet.ro/forum/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=46