THE RENEWAL OF the Bodleian Library by Sir Thomas Bodley followed the destruction of the earlier university library in the 1550s. On two occasions, in the aftermath of a bloody civil war, official orders were proclaimed by convocation, the university’s assembly, for the books written by John Milton to be burned in the quadrangle of the Old Schools, outside the library, along with the works of other religious writers associated with the losing Puritan cause such as John Knox, John Goodwin and Richard Baxter. According to Anthony Wood, on 16 June 1660, books by Milton and Goodwin were ‘called in and burnd’ after having been ‘taken out of those libraryes where they were’.1
Milton had been a great supporter of the Bodleian, sending a special copy of his Poems (1645), bound together with other pamphlets, to his friend John Rous who was the second Bodley’s librarian. The volume contained a poem especially written by Milton in praise of the librarian and the library, expressing his satisfaction that his poems would find ‘an unmolested happy home’ there.2 Milton had also, famously, written an eloquent defence of free speech in his Areopagitica (1644). In 1683 the Bodleian found itself in a particularly difficult position: should it bow to the pressure of the university authorities and relinquish this special volume, or should it preserve the volumes of the defender of free speech? The independently minded Bodleian – established as a ‘reference only’ library at its foundation, which had famously refused to loan a book to King Charles I when he was resident in Oxford in 1645 during the Civil War (despite Parliament establishing themselves in the library)3 – took the dangerous decision to defy the authorities and hid the volumes away, but a handwritten note kept in the librarian’s personal copy of the Bodleian’s catalogue shows that they had been carefully omitted from the public catalogue in order to maintain the secret of their existence.4 As a result, they can still be consulted today.5 As the case studies explored in this book have shown, librarians and archivists have played a vital role in preserving knowledge from attack, across many centuries.
Throughout this book I have tried to convey the long history of attacks on knowledge and the impact that the destruction of libraries and archives has had on communities and on society as a whole. Yet knowledge is still being attacked today. Ignorance about this history generates complacency of a kind that allowed the slow decline of the Library of Alexandria, and created a vulnerability that led to some libraries during the Reformation, including the University of Oxford’s, to be destroyed.
Complacency takes many forms. It almost certainly encouraged Home Office officials in their destruction of the Windrush landing records, as they assumed that the information was held elsewhere. We are being complacent today by not adequately preserving knowledge in digital form, and complacency is leading governments to reduce funding.
Archivists and librarians have developed strategies and techniques to protect the knowledge in their care. As individuals they have often shown astonishing levels of commitment and courage in saving things from destruction, whether they were the men and women of the Paper Brigade in Vilna in the 1940s, or Aida Buturović, who was killed in Sarajevo in 1992, or Kanan Makiya and his colleagues in the Iraq Memory Foundation in Baghdad in the 2000s.
‘There is no political power without power over the archive,’ wrote Jacques Derrida, the great French critic, in his classic work Archive Fever.6 This message has been learned by authoritarian regimes and major technology companies, the ‘private superpowers’ across the globe, who have taken control of the archive as it has moved into the digital realm (and in many cases where it has not). The complacency of society has meant lack of regulation, control and privacy surrounding the most powerful bodies of knowledge ever seen: the social media platforms and adtech datasets of the digital era, as I have tried to show in the previous chapter. As Orwell warned us in Nineteen Eighty-Four: ‘the past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.’
In the last few decades the library profession has undertaken what has been called ‘a service turn’.7 When I first began as a librarian a change was taking place, with the needs of users placed ahead of the priorities of the library staff. This has been a necessary strategy, and the profession has become much better because of it. As a result, however, we have become less concerned with preservation. Even as librarians and archivists have become very adept at using new technology, we have struggled to direct sufficient funding towards digital preservation.
As society begins to face the new digital age, we need to reprioritise. Preservation must be seen as a service to society. Ultimately, the funding that the ‘memory organisations’ receive from governments and other funding bodies is the most critical factor in enabling ‘preservation as a service’ to adapt to the changing nature of knowledge in the age of digital data. Funding for libraries has been reduced by political leaders in America, who have often assumed that online information has made libraries redundant. The reality is quite the reverse; libraries are so heavily used in the United States that they are being overwhelmed.8 We need our communities to tell their elected officials to prioritise libraries and archives, as they did in Columbus, Ohio in 2016, where the electorate voted to pay increased taxes in order to sustain their public library system.
Our professional bodies need to have louder voices, and our communities need to be encouraged to add their voices on our behalf. The preservation of knowledge has critically relied on people. Staffing levels are essential to ensuring that the fundamental tasks of those organisations can be undertaken. A theorist of libraries in the seventeenth century, Gabriel Naudé, declared that a pile of books was no more a library than a crowd of soldiers was an army.9 It is the library staff who turn the pile of books into ‘an organised body of knowledge’. They are guardians of the truth, collecting knowledge in both analogue and digital form. Without them, with their mixture of skills, dedication and passion for preservation, we will continue to lose knowledge.
In November 2018, Professor Philip Alston, United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, published a powerful statement on the condition of British society. ‘Digital assistance has been outsourced to public libraries and civil society organizations. Public libraries are on the frontline of helping the digitally excluded and digitally illiterate who wish to claim their right to Universal Credit.’10
One of the ways libraries are facing the challenges of funding and the shift to digital is to work more collaboratively. The preservation of knowledge now depends on this collaboration; as the scale of the challenges is so large not one institution can do it alone. In many ways this has always been the case – after the Reformation the books from the medieval libraries of Europe were preserved by hundreds of different libraries, ranging from the Bodleian (with thousands of medieval books) to Shrewsbury School Library, which holds just a handful. This idea of a distributed collection was never explicit, but as early as 1600 my predecessor Thomas James compiled a catalogue listing all the manuscripts in the libraries of Oxford and Cambridge. A much more broadly conceived catalogue was published in 1696 by Edward Bernard, an academic at Oxford, which listed all the manuscripts in institutional and private libraries in Britain.11 Scholars recognised the need to share the preservation of knowledge early on. Informal networks have expanded over time and have become more formal. A good example of this is the British and Irish Legal Deposit Libraries, who share the responsibility and the cost of legal deposit through multi-layered collaboration.
Libraries are increasingly sharing the storage of knowledge as well. In New Jersey, the massive RECAP facility is a shared store of printed materials and archives, co-funded and co-managed by Princeton University, Columbia University and the New York Public Library. The costs of operating great facilities like these are high, and if they can be shared then everyone benefits. In the digital sphere, coordinated action has been developed to distribute the burden of preservation. The CLOCKSS project is based on a very traditional model, one derived from the print world and applied to digital preservation by staff at Stanford University Library. The core concept they developed is simple and appealing: ‘Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe’ (LOCKSS), but it relies on libraries volunteering spare computing power in their operations. Collaboration and trust are key to the success of CLOCKSS, which applies the LOCKSS concept to preserving scholarly journals and now preserves over 33 million journal articles.12
Preserving knowledge has never been inexpensive. Funding is at the heart of a sustainable and successful library. Sir Thomas Bodley recognised this in the sixteenth century, suggesting that he would personally provide a ‘standing annual rent’, what we would today call an endowment, to give his new library funds, ‘in buying of books … officers stipends, and other pertinent occasions’. He thought that the reason the medieval library was destroyed was because of a lack of funding and a lack of staff.13
In the digital world knowledge is becoming inherently unstable and its durability depends on the institutions that keep it. Libraries and archives in the UK have found it hard to face the challenges of ‘austerity’ imposed on the public sector by the government in response to the global financial crisis of 2007–8. In local authorities, which are responsible for public libraries and for local record offices, funding for these services has to compete with schools, hospitals and collecting domestic refuse.
In South Africa, the task of archiving the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was given to the National Archives of South Africa, but the effectiveness of their work was severely hampered by lack of funds. The problem was simple – they didn’t have enough staff to do the work. This impacted on the process of transferring records from government departments to the archivists, resulting in backlogs of unprocessed records. Individuals were unable to access this ‘shared memory’, and the process of national healing was less effective. These are political decisions and the passing of legislation to require openness in government and to support the rights of citizens is one thing, but the allocation of resources to enable the legislation to be meaningful is another.14
Support for libraries and archives across the globe is under extreme pressure. In Nigeria historians have recently raised concerns that the National Archives of Nigeria are ‘in a very sorry state’ and need reinvigorating in order to understand Nigeria’s place in Africa. They have called for the federal government to ‘inject more life into the records and services of the National Archives of Nigeria’.15 In July 2019 the National Archives of Australia’s advisory council warned that, having been overlooked by the government, their archives were ‘in jeopardy’, having lost 10 per cent of their budget each year since 2014.16 The chairman of the advisory council said that ‘the digital archival records of the Commonwealth are currently fragmented across hundreds of separate systems and government entities exposed to compromise, obsolescence or loss’.17
Libraries and archives need to hold large amounts of physical material – books, manuscripts, maps and so on – as well as dealing with rapidly growing digital collections that are often costly to maintain. The challenge of the ‘hybrid’ collection means hiring additional staff with the right skills, experience and mindset (such as digital archivists or electronic-records managers). It also means investing in technical systems and workflow processes that comply with industry standards. For now it is librarians and archivists, the custodians of the past, who are the advance guards of the future. They have worked with open approaches to software development, data practices and scholarly communication for years.
One way that governments could tackle the funding problem is through taxing the major technology companies. The ‘private superpowers’, with their transnational ways of working, have been adept at avoiding tax. I have previously suggested that a ‘memory tax’ might be one way of dealing with the funding problem.18 The tech companies that earn so much from us all and pay so little in terms of regular business taxes could be asked to fund the very area they are undermining with their operations: social memory. A small levy, perhaps 0.5 per cent of their profits, might provide a serious fund that the public memory institutions could call on to support their work.
If other countries passed similar legislation in terms of taxation, a network could be formed to address the challenge of archiving the vast array of knowledge hosted by the social media companies. I have already shown that libraries and archives collaborate very effectively. They could do more, especially if given additional funds. As we have seen, archiving Twitter has proven to be too great a challenge even for the Library of Congress, and the challenges of archiving Facebook, WeChat, Weibo, Tencent or some of the other social media platforms could be even greater. Yet the longer we go on without a sustained attempt to archive the great social media platforms the weaker our society will be. We will lose a sense of the richness of human interaction and we will not be able to understand how our society has been influenced and affected by social media.
Modern life has become increasingly obsessed with the short-term. Investors look to gain instant returns, and trading has become automated to such an extent that billions of trades are made every hour in stock exchanges. This fixation with the short-term is evident in many walks of life. Long-term thinking has become unfashionable. The memory of mankind, the knowledge it has created in all its myriad forms, from cuneiform tablets to digital information, is never of purely short-term use. It may be cheaper, more convenient, easier and faster to destroy knowledge than to appraise, catalogue, preserve and make it available but to abandon knowledge for the sake of short-term expediency is a sure route to weakening society’s grip on truth.
The ancient libraries of Mesopotamia were filled with texts containing predictions for the future, using techniques we now call astrology, astronomy and divination. Rulers wanted to have information that would help them to decide the optimal time to go to war, plant or harvest a crop, and so on. Today the future continues to be dependent on access to knowledge of the past – and will be even more so as digital technology changes the ways we are able to predict what comes next.
As knowledge and truth continue to be targets of attack we must continue to put faith in our archives and libraries. Preservation should be seen as a service to society, for it underpins integrity, a sense of place and ensures diversity of ideas, opinions and memory. Libraries and archives are highly trusted by the general public, yet they are experiencing declining levels of funding. This is happening when the preservation of knowledge held in digital form is a major requirement for open, democratic societies. There is no time for complacency, the next attack on knowledge is about to happen, but if we can give libraries, archives and the people who work in them enough support they will continue to protect knowledge and make it available for everyone.