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In Burning the Books, Richard Ovenden describes the deliberate destruction of knowledge held in libraries and archives from ancient Alexandria to contemporary Sarajevo, from smashed Assyrian tablets in Iraq to the destroyed immigration documents of the UK Windrush generation. He examines both the motivations for these acts and the broader themes that shape this history. He also looks at attempts to prevent and mitigate attacks on knowledge, exploring the efforts of librarians and archivists to preserve information, often risking their own lives in the process. More than simply repositories for knowledge, libraries and archives inspire and inform citizens. In preserving notions of statehood recorded in such historical documents as the Declaration of Independence, libraries support the state itself. By preserving records of citizenship and records of the rights of citizens as enshrined in legal documents such as the Magna Carta and the decisions of the US Supreme Court, they support the rule of law. In this book, Ovenden takes a polemical stance on the social and political importance of the conservation and protection of knowledge, challenging governments in particular, but also society as a whole, to improve public policy and funding for these essential institutions.… (more)
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For the record, though, I'll throw in a bit of what Ovenden omits. Libraries are at the opposite end of the spectrum from archives, because if archives are important because they are the raw data of interest (e.g., government records, personal diaries, etc.), libraries are full of the reflective works that are written drawing upon that information. It is after this "transmutation," or ingestion, that archival information becomes knowledge. Archives, therefore, contain no knowledge, but only the basis to discern knowledge. Archival records do not speak for themselves, as Ovenden appears to suggest; for their story to emerge they must be studied, collated, compiled, contextualized. The outcomes of that process is "knowledge," and these conclusions are what are found in libraries. For many purposes this is a distinction without a difference, but Ovenden throughout the text displays his primary interest in archival work (it is where he has spent his professional life, not in libraries per se), and thus gives libraries short shrift. Both are relevant and important and worthy of preservation, but arguably no good purpose is served by careless conflation of important distinctions, especially by someone heading one of the premiere university libraries.
Richard Ovenden tells a fascinating and enjoyable story, including examples from
The author then details the political destruction, or retention, of libraries in a broader sense, including records created or held by the state, such as the Stasi secret personnel records in East Germany in 1989 and the early 1990’s, political records in Iraq in 2003 and 2013, the country’s library and records in the targeted Serbian destruction of Bosnia’s national library in 1992, and the destruction or removal of colonial records when the colonies of European countries became independent mainly in the second half of the twentieth century.
Ovenden then considers the problems of retaining records now that so much is created online. This part of the book is optimistic in setting out the issues and suggesting an approach to dealing with the current shortfall in funding, especially due to austerity measures.
Highly recommended.
A number of libraries were deliberately attacked and destroyed over the years, in attempts to suppress a religion or a specific culture. All the stories are heartbreaking to me, because of the loss of knowledge and history. And unfortunately it still continues today. Serbia's deliberate destruction of the National Library of Bosnia occurred only 30 years ago.
Ovenden also addresses the move to the digital world, and how much of current social discussion takes place online. He is greatly concerned about the loss of history for future research if what is online is not preserved. So much of it is currently under the control of a few large tech companies, whose purpose is to make money, not to preserve information for the future. Ovenden feels that libraries and archives need much better funding so that they can carry out the task of preserving this information for the future. At the end, he makes a plea to "the holders of power" to adequately fund libraries and archives.
I thought the book was interesting and very well written. Highly recommended.