Your Majesty,

Delegates,

Friends of the Library!

It’s a great pleasure and a privilege for me on behalf of the Norwegian government to welcome all of you to the 71 ^st> World Congress. It is an honour to Norway and to our capital that so many of you, from all over the world, have gathered here in Oslo for this event.

However, that you come together in a world congress is first of all a sign of skill and devotion and shows the importance of these meetings.

We live in a world which is constantly changing. New technology has made our daily life quite different from what it was just a decade ago. New developments will make the future different from what we experience today, not least in the library sector. Your situation can be compared to what the great scholar Albert Einstein faced when the physics was undergoing great changes with new discoveries and theories.

Einstein was preparing an examination for his students. The night before the actual test he was dictating to his secretary the questions he would present to the candidates the next morning. “Excuse me, Professor Einstein”, his secretary said, “but these questions are exactly the same questions you put to the students last year”. “Yes”, Mr Einstein replied, “but I have changed the answers”.

That was the challenge the students in physics were confronted with in Einstein’s days.

The challenge of change!

The change of development!

And that is the challenge you are confronted with in your work.

And that is the challenge we are all confronted with in our daily life.

The ansvers of today are not necessarily the answers of tomorrow.

This year, 2005, we celebrate the centennial anniversary of Norway as an independent state. This world congress underscores the role libraries play in this celebration.

Our libraries are part of our national collective memory. Libraries are as vital to a country as the brain to a human being.

The Norwegian national library will tomorrow open its new and renovated buildings in Oslo. I am happy that this important event take place during the IFLA-Congress.

Last autunum, on the eve of our anniversary year 2005, the Norwegian parliament voted for a re-formulation of the paragraph in our constitution stating freedom of expression for all inhabitants. The new paragraph goes much further than the original one, stating the need for freedom of expression and its arena. Libraries are an essential part of the arena.

Freedom of expression is essential to a living democracy. Without the possibility to express diverging views, to oppose established ideas, to protest against official policies and authorities, to go against the majority, there is no democracy. Democracy is freedom of expression. The libraries provide free access to information – which is fundamental in this respect.

This congress is a tribute to the library – a tribute to you who have taken up the challenges of modern communication technology. A library of today is so much more than a library of yesterday, so much more than a building filled with books, and who knows what the library of tomorrow will look like. By adopting modern information technologies libraries have taken the step into cyberspace with its pending challenges.

Let me take this opportunity to thank everybody responsible for this congress. First of all I want to thank the International Federation of Library Associations with its president Mrs Kay Raseroka, for choosing Oslo. Then thanks to the Norwegian organising committee with its chairman Professor Jon Bing. And also thanks to all those who have been working so hard and so long for this congress. Finally my thanks go to you, delegates, who constitute the ultimate guarantee for a successful meeting.

Dear everyone!

It’s a pleasure for me to declare the World Library and Information Congress 2005 open.

I am pleased to give the floor to the chairman of the Norwegian organising committee, Professor Jon Bing.