Biblioteca Universitatii "Lucian Blaga" Sibiu

Call for contributions

The annual International Conference "Libraries, Knowledge and Information"

organized in Sibiu, on 25th-27th April 2024, by the Library of the "Lucian Blaga" University of Sibiu, in partnership with the ASTRA Sibiu County Library and the Bayreuth University Library.

The main theme is "Information Production and Circulation in the Age of Crisis"

The past years and the years to come have been and continue to be, as far as we can tell, under the sign of crises of all kinds. The Great Recession at the end of the first decade of the 2000s, the general crisis of democratic systems in the following decade, the rise of right-wing populism, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the return of war in Europe, have all rolled on seemingly without pause and in contrast to the climate crisis that has been increasingly talked about in recent years.
In all these crises, the role of information has proved crucial, with how it has been packaged, disseminated, and used influencing people's response to calls and appeals often coming from opposite directions. As it seems to be the vector of an increasingly turbulent 21st century, information, its nature, and its roles, must be questioned in the most critical and nuanced way

The Library of the "Lucian Blaga" University of Sibiu, in partnership with the ASTRA Sibiu County Library and with The Bayreuth University Library, as the institutions entrusted with the retrieval, selection, circulation and organisation of knowledge, are best placed to provoke such a discussion. Libraries are, by tradition, important nodes in the global information network, hosting over time not only knowledge (in its various forms), but also debates that engage knowledge in clarifying issues of interest to the citizenry. Assuming this, we propose to conduct a debate in an inter-disciplinary manner, inviting specialists from any field concerned with the nature and function of information in contemporary society (information and documentation sciences, journalism, communication and media, philosophy, sociology, education, culture, etc.).

Panel topics:
1. Information desk: information literacy, media literacy, democratic culture. Evaluation of information in traditional and online media; social media as platforms of influence; socio-economic contexts of information production; facets of fake news; information and democracy;
2. Bookshelves: books and libraries. The history of books and libraries; the state of libraries in today's crisis era; library services and programs; the book market and the state of the bookstores;
3. Open: open source, open science, open access. Free access to information and its derivatives, from free and open source software to free academic production, and their implications for freedom and knowledge.
4. Online: digit(al)ization. Digitalisation and its impact on society; digital humanities; digitisation of traditional information resources, digitally born information resources, e-book publishing.

Key dates:
We invite you to submit proposals for papers, which fit into any of the themes of the four conference panels, as follows:
- The deadline for submission is 15 November 2023;
- You can register for the paper section or the poster section;
- The proposal must include the title and an abstract of maximum 300 words, in Romanian or English;
- Papers will be selected, and notification of acceptance will be communicated by 5 December 2023;
- The selected papers may be published in Transilvania, a journal indexed in SCOPUS and EBSCO.
- Paper/presentation proposals should be sent electronically to the conference secretariat:luminita.buta@ulbsibiu.ro

Location: the headquarters of the "Lucian Blaga" University Library in Sibiu and the ASTRA Sibiu County Library;
Date of the conference: 25th-27th April 2024.

Scientific Committee:
PhD. Valer Simion Cosma (LBUS Library),
PhD. Răzvan Pop (ASTRA Sibiu County Library),
Lecturer Robert Coravu (University of Bucharest),
PhD. Claudia Șerbănuță (Communities of the Future Association),
Lecturer Maura Giura (Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu),
Lecturer Silviu Borș (Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu)

Organizing Committee:
Coordinator, Lecturer Bogdan Vătavu (Faculty of Letters and Arts ULBS)
Secretary: Luminița Buta (LBUS Library)
Adrian Preda, Daniela Rățoi, Irina Racovițan (ASTRA Sibiu County Library)
Elena Mărginean, Riana Bucșă, Camelia Volosciuc, Cristina Pârvu, Liliana Oprescu (LBUS Library)

The Library of the Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu