As far as libraries and librarians are concerned, the situation has evolved and ripened a good deal since the library workshop at WSF in Mumbai 2004. This is one conclusion from NIGD's workshop on "The Role of The Library in the WSF Process" in Bamako on Sunday 22 January 2006.

Support from librarians, as a professional group, should be seen as just as necessary to the WSF as is, say, the contributions of journalists and translators. A positive sign was the open-mindedness, and even enthusiasm, by which library and information specialists from Mali and other African countries embraced the WSF and the ideas of this workshop.

Groups of librarians in different countries should now take on the task of creating an adequate documentation of the WSF-process in their libraries, starting with the WSF in Nairobi (January 2007).

Librarians could provide the global justice movement with a documentation service that corresponds to the interpretation service offered by BABELS, which did the indispensable interpretation from English to French and from French to English during our workshop in Bamako.

A corresponding service from the side of the library community could be called the BIBELS, added Antonio Martins from ATTAC Brazil.

In addition to discussing the role of the libraries in the WSF process, the workshop also confronted the general question: What would be an adequate public library service in today's African countries? (Not to speak of the need to take a fresh look at the role of the libraries in the other parts of the world!)

Progressive African Library & Information Activists' Group (PALIAct ) is one of the new groups which try to answer that question. Local instances of PALIAct are about to be formed in, to begin with, in Kenya and Ghana. The two Kenyan participants in the workshop, Esther Obachi and Mary Wanjohi, are both involved in PALIAct. They are planning the follow-up of this workshop at the WSF in Nairobi 2007.

Other African initiatives present at the workshop were, for instance, the "Communication pour une développement durable" (CDD), represented by Lorimpo Kombaté from Togo, and the "Open Knowledge Network" (OKN) with Peter Benjamin from South Africa.

Mamadou Konoba Keita (director of the national library of Mali), Lamine Camara (secretary of the Malian library Association AMBAD) and Anne Abdrahamane from the library of the medical faculty of the university in Bamako presented the situation of libraries in Mali. Their presentations and other materials from the workshop will be included in a special issue of "Information for Social Change", edited by Kingsley Oghojafor from Nigeria, and the present writer.