January 30 – 31, 2025, the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation hosted international research and methodology conference “Foresight of Education – the Portrait of a Student of the Future” organised with the support of the International Association of Financial and Economic Education Organizations.

The representatives of state authorities, heads and specialists of establishments of higher education and business structures, the officials of the Russian Orthodox Church, libraries and other institutions of science and culture gathered together to discuss modern trends and prospects of higher education in Russia. They considered the collective image of the student customer of educational services, they spoke about competences and skills the contemporary teacher had to master. There were not left aside problems of usage of AI in education and gamification of educational processes either.

Within the framework of the conference meetings there was held subject discussion “Foresight of Libraries – the Portrait of a Reader of the Future”. Its moderators were Tatyana Korchagina, the director of library and information centre of Financial University, Natela Kvelidze – Kuznetsova, head of Herzen University Fundamental Library named after Empress Maria Feodorovna, and Elena Beylina, the director general of the “University BOOK” publishing house and chair of the Russian Book Union. The participants discussed the general concept of library of the future as a common cultural and educational centre, soft skills of librarian as a hybrid specialist of an inter-disciplinary team.

Furthermore, there were demonstrated successful practices of transformation of a common library space into informal point of destination of the youth, both reading and not-reading, and hard and software solutions for 24-hour user service beyond libraries.

Parallelly, in Telegram chat there was launched a poll for the participants on how readers’ demands were revealed in their organizations, which competences did they find obligatory to obtain for the librarians of the digital era and which challenges and menaces for libraries and data providers could they distinguish. Then, there were evaluated potential prospects of the already existing library services and rich content of aggregators.

The streams of discussion “Foresight of Libraries – the Portrait of a Reader of the Future” is available on the link.  

All you would ever like to know about the events of the international research and methodology conference “Foresight of Education – the Portrait of a Student of the Future” alongside with links to other enthralling streams can be obtained on the official webpage of the conference.