I WOULD LIKE to highlight five functions of libraries and archives that we lose when they are lost or destroyed. Librarians and archivists do their jobs, and advocate for their funding but the power often lies elsewhere. It is to the holders of power that these five functions of libraries and archives are addressed. This is what we lose when those institutions are destroyed or starved of funds.
• Firstly, they support the education of society as a whole and of specific communities within it.
• Secondly, they provide a diversity of knowledge and ideas.
• Thirdly, they support the well-being of citizens and the principles of the open society through the preservation of key rights and through encouraging integrity in decision-making.
• Fourthly, they provide a fixed reference point, allowing truth and falsehood to be judged through transparency, verification, citation and reproducibility.
• Finally, they help root societies in their cultural and historical identities through preserving the written record of those societies and cultures.
First, education. The educational role of libraries and archives is truly powerful. Libraries provide opportunities to enable critical thinking and they allow exploration of new ideas in a supportive setting. For most libraries access is free of charge, or at very low cost, and patrons are treated equally no matter what their background or purpose of study. In the 1990s the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo supported the education not just of the students and researchers in the main university of the region but of the entire nation. Attacking it severely damaged the education of a generation. Today university and college libraries around the globe continue to serve huge populations of students and researchers. In the 2017–18 academic year alone there were more than 40 million interactions with the Bodleian’s collections, ranging from downloads of journal articles to calling up medieval manuscripts from the stacks. The academic community in the University of Oxford reading this material (or running programmes to data-mine it) was less than 30,000 individuals. Multiply these figures across the hundred and thirty or so universities in the UK, or the thousands in the United States, and then across the globe, and you get a sense of the centrality of libraries and the impetus they give to the improvement of society.
Public library systems and local archives are similarly crucial for the communities they serve. The work they do is expanding all the time, as the needs of their communities change and evolve. Millions of books are borrowed every year in the UK alone. The reality of funding for these institutions is extremely challenging. In the UK in 2017–18, funding for public libraries fell by £30 million, over a hundred and thirty libraries closed and five hundred more were run by volunteers rather than professional librarians.1 Given the importance of public libraries in education, this will undoubtedly exacerbate social inequality and reduce social mobility. We read with horror how the public library of Jaffna was deliberately targeted in an attack aimed at damaging the educational opportunities of a community there, yet all around us public libraries are closing, their funding being cut.
In the ‘era of austerity’ public libraries in many countries have found themselves in the front line of supporting their communities. Public libraries have responded in innovative ways. The New York Public Library has begun to ‘loan’ articles of clothing like ties and briefcases to help individuals who cannot afford to look conventionally ‘smart’ to attend job interviews. In the UK, as government has moved so many of its services to digital platforms, so public libraries have responded with targeted services for those excluded by the digital divide.
The preservation of knowledge can have a profound educational role. The issue of climate change is perhaps the most urgent facing the world and an important recent study analyses climate data contained in an extraordinary archival record, one that details the grape harvests in Beaune, the wine capital of Burgundy, between 1354 and 2018. There is an incredibly rich set of climate data in these records, going back in an unbroken run, perhaps the longest continuous set of climate records in Europe. Climate scientists have found that they can use this data to show that the frequencies of extreme weather in earlier centuries were outliers, but that these extremes have become the norm, since an observable shift in the climate since 1988.2 The records were created by some of the greatest vineyards in the world, but are latent with potential for other uses than the ones they were originally created for. We do not always know the value of the knowledge we are losing when it is destroyed or allowed to decay.
Secondly, libraries and archives provide a diversity of knowledge and ideas. They make it possible to face the present and the future through deepening an understanding of the past. The ideas we encounter, the histories that we understand and the culture that we engage with help make us who we are. But we need this pool of ideas and information to be constantly refreshed if we are to be creative and innovative. This is true not just in the case of, say, the creative fields of art, music and literature, but more generally. The democracy that we have in Britain relies on the free circulation of ideas in order to breathe life into the questioning spirit of our democratic processes. This means, in part, the freedom of the press, but citizens need to have access to knowledge of all shades of opinion. Libraries acquire all kinds of content and this resource allows our views to be challenged and for citizens to inform themselves, following John Stuart Mill’s insistence in On Liberty that ‘only through diversity of opinion is there, in the existing state of human intellect, a chance of fair play to all sides of the truth.’3
In 1703 Henry Aldrich, the dean of Christ Church, suggested to the great astronomer Edmund Halley that he should work on ancient Greek scientific works, following his appointment as Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford. One of the projects Halley began was to continue the work of a great scholar of languages, Edward Bernard, who had consulted an Arabic manuscript of the Greek scientist Apollonius of Perga’s important work of geometry ‘On the division of a ratio’ in the Bodleian. Halley, in completing Bernard’s work, translated and published the text in 1706.4 As Isaac Newton, Halley’s friend and collaborator, famously said: ‘If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.’ Generations of librarians and collectors had preserved these ancient texts from destruction so that they could provide the diverse knowledge that could spark new discoveries.
This diversity can be rejected by oppressive regimes, closing down the opportunity for learning and for testing ideas and opinions. In Turkey, the regime of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in August 2019 began the destruction of books associated with their opponent, Fethullah Gülen. So far 300,000 copies of books have been removed from schools and libraries. Publishing houses have also been attacked, prompting criticism from bodies like International PEN. It is hard to see what the destruction of the books in libraries will achieve other than making the texts more desirable.
Unless libraries and archives are allowed to operate without interference from government their role in providing access to knowledge that may challenge authorities or received views will be eroded. In Guatemala’s long internal conflict, the role of the police in state oppression of its citizens and the abuse of human rights was highly controversial. Human rights groups saved the historical archive of the national police from destruction. Access to these records was helping Guatemalans come to terms with their recent history, but in March 2019 the staff were made redundant and access to the papers was stopped. Calls have since been made for these archives to be protected from damage and political interference and for copies to be made and lodged in Switzerland and in the Library of the University of Texas at Austin.5 As with the Zaydi libraries in Yemen, attacks on knowledge seek to eradicate diverse opinion and ideas, but the international community of scholarship can use digital technologies to preserve the material.
Thirdly, libraries and archives support the well-being of citizens and the principles of an open society through the preservation of key rights and encouraging integrity in decision-making. Archives can be, in the words of historian Trevor Aston, ‘fortifications for the defence of one’s rights’.6 These rights can be abused when archival material is missing, as in the case of the former Yugoslavia, where records were destroyed by the Serbian militia, a deliberate attempt to deprive Muslim citizens of their rights and to eradicate the memory of Muslim presence in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Over the last three decades the role played by archives to support the rights of citizens to know what happened in their country in states like East Germany and South Africa has been of critical importance in the re-establishment of democracy. Thousands of sacks of shredded material was found in the Stasi office in Berlin-Lichtenberg, which ‘testified to the zeal of those fearful of the typewritten evidence of their activities’, according to Joachim Gauck, the first Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic (known more colloquially as the Gauck Authority).7 The process of opening up the Stasi files has been enormously important for the former communist countries in central and eastern Europe. The way the state operated its regime of control has been made transparent, down to allowing people access to their own files.8 By the end of June 1994, just five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, over 1.85 million requests had been made to access files in the Gauck Authority.9
The shift in the documentation of everyday life, business and government to the digital world brings with it complex issues. Digital preservation is becoming one of the biggest problems we face: if we do not act now our successors in future generations will rue our inaction. The archiving of the web, and of social media, is a particularly pressing concern. In 2012, computer scientists Hany SalahEldeen and Michael Nelson examined a large sample of social media posts regarding major events, such as Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, the death of Michael Jackson, the Egyptian revolution and the Syrian uprising. Their studies revealed a shocking rate of loss: 11 per cent of posts had disappeared from the sites within a year and the rate of attrition has continued. As we have seen with websites relating to the EU referendum in the UK, and with the record of other key contemporary events on the web, preserving these websites will become increasingly important for openness in our political and social lives.
Libraries and archives are developing web archiving as part of their preservation activities, sometimes supported by legal deposit legislation (as in the UK). There needs to be a much bolder push to develop legally supported and properly funded national domain-based web archiving. The Internet Archive continues to provide leadership and it is the memory institutions that must lead on archiving the web as a key part of social memory.
Fourthly, libraries and archives provide a fixed reference point allowing truth and falsehood to be held to account through verification, citation and reproducibility. The idea of keeping knowledge may have begun with the administration of taxes in the ancient world, but it should be placed squarely in the modern age with notions of accountability. ‘Every record has been destroyed or falsified … every date altered … And the process is continuing day by day. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right,’ wrote Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four.10 To avoid this situation we need to preserve records and make them accessible.
The summer of 2019 witnessed mass protests against the Hong Kong government, some of the largest non-violent protests in modern history, and although these have been marred by occasional acts of violence for the most part they show widespread concern by the citizens of Hong Kong that the independence of their society is threatened by the People’s Republic of China. Hong Kong’s public records are not subject to any legislation that controls what is kept or what rights the citizens have to access their own history or that of the city’s government. In 2018 official reports suggest that 4,400 metres of records were destroyed (roughly half the height of Mount Everest) by the Government Records Service. There is concern that sensitive records, such as the treatment of the 2014 Occupy Protests, or those of the much more broadly supported protests in 2019, have been destroyed, and campaigners call for laws to bind government officials to be more transparent in their record-keeping, allowing the government to be held to account. An editorial in the South China Morning Post put it eloquently in April 2019 (before the wave of protests was underway): ‘Proper archives and open access are hallmarks of good governance.’11 Passing archives legislation is not going to solve the problems facing Hong Kong but it would be a big step towards openness and integrity in government.
Archives and libraries support their communities by providing infrastructure that supports accountability. Accountability has become important in contemporary science. ‘Reproducibility of science’ and ‘research ethics’ are the buzzwords in the scientific community but they boil down to the same thing: can the public access the underlying data so that the claims made by scientists can be verified (or the result of experiments reproduced) by other scientists? This process requires the data to be held independently so that it can be openly accessed – some of the research funders in the UK (like the Environmental and Physical Sciences Research Council) now require researchers to deposit the data connected to research that they have funded in recognised data repositories.
The volume of scientific papers has massively increased in recent decades, partly fuelled by the pressure on scientists to publish their findings quickly – often in order to be ahead of competing research groups. Scientific journals have also been complicit in encouraging scientists to bring out high profile papers that announce important science. The rush to publish, and the competitive nature of publishing, has led to some notable instances of ‘fake science’ where scientific discoveries have been announced that have essentially been made up, and where the results cannot be replicated by other researchers. A recent paper on ‘fake science’, published by the Royal Society in London (one of the oldest and most respected scientific bodies in the world), urged that ‘it is especially important that the scientific world as a whole upholds the highest standards of ethical behaviour, honesty and transparency, aiming to sustain the gold standards of research integrity and validated information’, and the authors admitted that ‘Sadly, a range of forces are working counter to this aspiration. People in the world of science are not immune from the personal ambitions and prevailing pressures that drive behaviour in general.’12
In order to combat these trends, there has been an increased focus on research ethics in the academic world, bringing forward the notion of ‘reproducibility of research’, which means being able to obtain consistent scientific results using the same input data, methodologies, code and conditions of analysis. And publishing research data in open access form can help to rebuild trust and transparency. Libraries are key to this process, as they typically host institutional repositories of open access research papers and research data on behalf of scientific communities. Staff help guide researchers through this process, supporting the drafting of data management plans at the point of applying for funding to undertake the research, and through giving advice on technical aspects such as metadata.
Finally, libraries and archives help root societies in their cultural and historical identities through preserving the written record of those societies. The idea that they are key to helping communities appreciate their ‘sense of place’ and ‘common memory’ is nothing new. I first became aware of it as a teenager when I discovered that the Deal public library had a local history section, full of obscure books, pamphlets and newspapers (as well as special indexes and catalogues). Thousands of citizens in Deal have used the collection over the years to research the history of their home or an incident in the town’s past, but especially their family history. Libraries, record offices and local history centres have wonderfully rich collections where often very rare and obscure materials are acquired (often by donation) and gifted to the local ‘memory institution’. This work often goes uncelebrated and is often very poorly funded. A renewal of emphasis on local history might help our communities develop a greater sense of their own place, helping to bind them together, encouraging more understanding of who we are and where we come from.
People’s culture and sense of identity have often been targeted. Nazi attacks on Jewish and ‘un-German’ literature were a warning sign of their policy of genocide against the People of the Book. In Bosnia the Serb attacks on archives and the destruction of the National and University Library were born of the desire to wipe out the memory of Muslim participation in Bosnian history and culture. We should all see attacks on books as an ‘early warning’ signal that attacks on humans cannot be far behind.
There are a multitude of accounts of the deliberate destruction of knowledge as a routine aspect of colonialism and empire. As we have seen, the issue of ‘displaced and migrated archives’ is becoming increasingly visible. These materials play an important role in shaping historical narratives for recently independent states, especially now that we are entering the period where some of these countries will celebrate anniversaries of their independence. Part of being happy to be seventy-five, sixty, fifty years of age may often include celebrating the history of achievement since the date of independence. But it may also reflect further back in time, to the former colonial periods, sometimes comparing ‘now and then’, sometimes addressing historic injustices, sometimes simply relating history. Colonial-era history is dependent on colonial-era archives and publications. Access to this history can become politically sensitive. ‘What’s burned won’t be missed’ is a comment uttered by a British official in 1963 instructing his staff on the appraisal of records in North Borneo prior to independence.13
The return of knowledge can help societies to understand their own place in the world and to come to terms with the past, especially when the past has been difficult, as we have seen with Iraq, Germany and South Africa. In November 2018, a controversial report on the restitution of cultural artefacts written by Bénédicte Savoy and Felwine Sarr was published in France. The Savoy-Sarr report has provoked major discussions in the international museum community over the treatment of collections acquired during the colonial era, calling for the complete and unconditional return of African artefacts. The report simply comments that: ‘In Africa, all of our interlocutors insisted not only on the restitution of cultural heritage objects held in French museums but also on the need for a serious reflection on the question of archives.’14
These five functions are not intended to be comprehensive, but merely a way of highlighting the value of the preservation of knowledge to society. Libraries and archives take the long view of civilisation in a world that currently takes the short-term view. We ignore their importance at our peril.