Event report

The Central Library has listened to an intense and passionate debate on the future of Europe, and its challenges ahead, held at the Goethe-Institut in Brussels.

Our followers will have seen lots of tweeting activity from the conference Who holds the power in the new European Parliament and why? The Council Library was bound to attend this event hosted by CEPS where VoteWatch Europe Director presented his report on the distribution of seats at Bureau and committee level in the new European Parliament.

In the context of our monitoring of various think tank events in the Brussels bubble, we attended as US Ambassador to the EU Anthony Gardner presented his views on US - EU relations at a briefing hosted by the European Policy Centre. His remarks ranged from notes on current foreign policy challenges to TTIP negotiations and the role of the UK in the EU.

While the team is busy sifting through think tank publications for the next issue of our Review, here's a look back to days 2 and 3 of the 2014 UACES conference.

As announced in yesterday's post, the first plenary session at the 2014 UACES  was meant to map the EU political landscape after this year's European elections, nominations and appointments.

As someone just put it on Twitter, with "new people in #EUtopjobs & more possible sanctions against Russia, there should be a conference on all this EU stuff..."

August is no 'silly season' for information professionals: some of us have joined 4000 other librarians in Lyon for the 80th World Library and Information Congress.

The Library was able to attend the launch of the report from the  New Pact for Europe initiative at the European Policy Centre. 

On 12 and 13 June, a group of librarians from the Central Library of the Council of the European Union attended this year's Eurolib general assembly, held in The Hague.

As our readers know, the library tries to monitor think tank events in the 'Brussels bubble', especially those that generate a flow of documents. So we could not really miss, last week, the policy briefing by the European Policy Center with the UK Minister of State for Europe, David Lidington, who addressed a rather large audience on "The policy priorities of the next European Commission - a UK perspective".

On 10 April 2014, we attended a book talk organised by the NATO Library in Brussels. Heidi Hardt, a professor at the University of Texas, presented her new book 'Time to react' which addresses crisis response efficiency of international organisations.

Just a few notes from this session, with links to additional resources.

We are always looking for interesting papers to report in our (roughly) monthly Think Tank Review. So we could not really miss this year's edition of the Brussels Think Tank Dialogue.