CILIP Article: How do librarians oppose knowledge destruction?

Richard Ovenden, Bodley’s Librarian, and author of Burning the Books will be a keynote speaker at the CILIP 2020 Conference: Reimagined. Here he discusses how the profession is still developing its defences

As the senior executive of the Bodleian Libraries, Richard heads one of the oldest libraries in Europe. It was created as a safe haven for knowledge after what he describes as the “general carnage of institutional libraries in the middle decades of the 16th century”.

But, despite the “very careful arrangements put in place by our founder Sir Thomas Bodley and the first librarian Thomas James”, Richard says that knowledge preservation remained a precarious business at the Bodleian. His recently published book, Burning the Books, which explores how librarians and archivists have opposed the destruction of knowledge around the world, includes a home-grown example of a Bodley’s Librarian who had to weigh his principles against his personal safety.

“Milton had been a great friend of one of my predecessor, John Rouse,” Richard says, “and he had presented a volume of his own works to the library with a poem in honour of the Bodleian. But in 1660 his works were being burned across the country as part of the purging of the publications of anyone who was seen to be on the wrong side. One of these phases of book burning actually took place in the quadrant of the Bodleian itself, and my predecessor hid the volume saving it from the conflagration. It is an episode that inspired a chapter in the first volume of Philip Pullman’s Book of Dust trilogy, La Belle Sauvage.”

Money problems

Even when the physical and political threats to knowledge preservation were overt, librarians saw that financial and managerial negligence were equally dangerous to knowledge preservation. It is still the case. “At the moment libraries (in the UK) aren’t under threat physically in the way that they were 500 years ago,” says Richard. “But one of the motivations for founding the library in the way that Sir Thomas Bodley did was because – to use his language – “we lacked a standing rent for officers’ stipends, for the augmentation of books and for other pertinent occasions”. That means sustainable funding in today’s language.

“That very much is a problem that we face now, and it is an acute one. Over the last 20 years we’ve seen carnage in public libraries with many institutions closing and funding levels in many parts of the library sector put under severe stress.” Richard’s book includes international and historical examples of knowledge destruction, but his motivation is more current and local: “I definitely feel the same pain that my colleagues in the sector feel. Fortunately, we’re a big institution, we have diverse income streams that may be different to other libraries but ultimately we face the same pressures. The scale is different, but the impacts are the same. What may be different is that I feel an obligation, because being in this library, in this university, I have access to a platform to speak about it. And I take that seriously.”

Different roads to destruction

“The book is to raise these issues to a wider audience,” Richard says, “and to show that the risk is not just a narrow one affecting the library profession, but a broader one to society as a whole – to the work that libraries and archives do on behalf of society. That’s what’s at stake.” So, what is at stake? “There are a variety of aspects that society needs libraries and archives for which I play out at the end of my book. Some of it is about the broad educational benefits that libraries bring to our communities. With archives it can be a lot more specific: about accountability, integrity, transparency in public life.” And while he agrees that poor funding will eventually lead to the same thing – the destruction of libraries, archive and knowledge – he says: “I would put it in a more nuanced way. I think there are slightly different impacts that the underfunding of libraries will have, as opposed to archives, so I wouldn’t want to over-simplify it. But it does, at the end of the day, boil down to the same thing. Whether libraries are destroyed by us setting fire to them or playing it out over a longer period of time by underfunding them… the impact of the loss of libraries is probably the same.”

Fake news and free speech

While the old threat of financial neglect looms large, librarians have to cope with many new challenges to their value and their principles. One is ‘fake news’ and how to keep communities informed in a fast-moving media landscapes without resorting to censorship. “We do have an obligation to preserve different kinds of knowledge whether they are true or false” Richard says. “Is it important for libraries to preserve both Breitbart website as well as Hansard? Yes of course it is, although one may be more trustworthy than the other.” He says the problems posed by untrustworthy documents are partly dealt with by “our traditional role in describing knowledge,” but adds that it is “also in being able to educate our users to distinguish different sources of knowledge and make their own judgements about the veracity of sources.”

But there is always tension: “One of the challenges we face is the difference between our role supporting free speech and our role helping our communities to access trustworthy information, or information that doesn’t incite hatred and division. It can be a very difficult balance to strike but it comes up time and again in a number of ways. For example, should we have Mein Kampf on open shelves in our libraries? The answer will be different in different situations. I don’t think there will be a blanket approach. In a library like the Bodleian I think we should enable students to encounter those ideas and read them at first hand and use their critical judgement. But I think local librarians will face local issues with their own communities. That’s why we need trained experienced professionals running libraries because the issues that they face can be complex and will require careful consideration.”

The price of principles

Asked how important the existence of a profession is in empowering librarians to do their jobs, Richard said: “I think librarians and archivists will sometimes have to make very difficult decisions and ones in which their own principles about preserving the truth have to come to the fore. Librarians will decide to use whatever approaches they can in order to preserve the truth and there are numerous examples where that is happening around the world right now. I think that will always be part of what librarians do.

“I’m not going to encourage librarians to put their lives at risk but what I would say, and what you will see through my book, is that librarians and archivists have risked their lives and lost their lives through history in the pursuit of their professional roles. I think that should be recognised in our profession that there have been moments in history – the Holocaust being one – which I talk about at length – where the preservation of knowledge has been part of the preservation of whole communities and societies and I think that history is something that we should be proud of and celebrate.”

Not all negative

Change often comes from political pressure, sometimes it acts as a positive force for knowledge preservation, sometimes negative. Richard sees decolonisation as a positive example – one that should result in more and richer knowledge. “My sense is that librarians are very responsive to this issue.

“It has prompted us to think differently about our own profession, the make-up of our profession itself, who our fellow librarians and archivists are, and how we’ve dealt with our collections. I don’t see the profession of librarianship doing anything but responding positively. And I don’t see it as political pressure. I see it more broadly as a cultural shift in our society across the globe. It’s not confined to any one country or any one part of society and what libraries are doing is responding to a moment, a cultural change, and one in which is overdue – and one in which we were complicit.”

Uncharted territory

Some of the most powerful forces impacting the profession are still baffling the political systems of democracies. They are also too new for the profession to have developed its defences. “The final two chapters of the book that deal with this directly: how society has sleep walked into embracing technology – for many valid reasons – but now we have essentially outsourced the creation and management of knowledge to the ‘private super powers’. This has huge implications for an open society.” He sees it in all aspects of public life, from attempts to influence elections to the hidden use of channels like WhatsApp by public officials and special advisers. He recently wrote and Op Ed in the Financial Times arguing that private communications like this should be brought under the 1958 Public Records Act.

“There are a whole variety of inter-related aspects to these problems,” he says. “The response is to empower libraries and archives through legislation and funding so they can take a more active role in the preservation of digital knowledge. Here I wear my hat as president of the Digital Preservation Coalition, as well as being a librarian, and I posit the idea of a ‘memory tax’ on the profits of the big tech firms to channel back to libraries and archives.”