Silvia Stasselová
- member of the IFLA Governing Board
- DG of the University Library in Bratislava
Silvia Stasselová,
general director of the University Library in Bratislava
She has been actively working professionally in the field of librarianship since 1990, of which 25 years as the head of the academic library at the Slovak Technical University and currently as the general director of the University Library in Bratislava. In this management position, she is the first woman at the head of the oldest scientific library in Slovakia and at the same time an important cultural and educational institution under the founding authority of the Ministry of Culture of the Slovak Republic, since its establishment in 1919.
In May 2023, she made Slovakia and Slovak librarianship visible in the elections to the bodies of the international library federation IFLA - International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. She was successfully elected among the 5 members of the global IFLA Governing Board and became the first librarian from Slovakia to do so in almost 100 years since the foundation of IFLA in 1927.
During her more than 30-year professional career, she held a number of important positions in Slovak and international librarian bodies, and for almost 20 years she was the president of the librarian professional association – the Association of Slovak Librarians and Libraries (1999 – 2019). Since 2007, she has held several positions in professional bodies of IFLA sections and in the regional European Committee of IFLA: www.ifla.org
In Slovakia, she organized a number of important international librarian symposia, conferences and the international Colloquium of library and information specialists from the V4+ countries in 2019. For more than 10 years, she was the Slovak coordinator of a successful international event to support children's reading - A night with Andersen.
She is actively involved in the issue of library architecture and was instrumental in promoting a separate grant sub-programme of the Federal University of Slovak Republic to support the modernization of library buildings and interiors in Slovakia. She has visited libraries on several continents of the world, has extensive lecturing and publishing activities, and has translated more than 30 international IFLA library documents from English to Slovak for the needs of Slovak librarianship.