Category: Recommended Reading

The Destruction of Libraries: Book Reviews

[Written at the request of my alma mater for their project, “Books and Destruction: Honoring Banned Books Week,” during August 2015.]

Libraries and archives are frequent targets in war and conflict. Institutions that support the rule of law, encourage the exploration of ideas and identity, and stand for intellectual freedom are a grace threat to regimes that seek to control all aspects of public and private life.

The number of books that address this topic is, sadly, growing. Rebecca Knuth’s two most recent books, Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century and Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction, deserve attention for their thorough scholarship and attention to current events. Lost Libraries: The Destruction of Great Book Collections Since Antiquity, an essay collection edited by James Raven, might be read back to back with Lucien Polastron’s Books on Fire: the Destruction of Libraries Throughout History, which is both thoroughly researched and deeply felt. A Universal History of the Destruction of Books by Fernando Báez may deserve a reader’s first attention, though. It is a comprehensive and provocative starting place, for one, but it is also a book that has been widely read in translation, which makes it a particularly fitting introduction to a problem that so often emerges from the fractured relations between nations.

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Cited in Future of the Book

Well, Christmas has come early for me. I’ve been quoted in the November 13 edition of the Future of the Book. Nothing says geek-chic like a nod from Future of the Book, in my opinion. FofB is the brainchild of Gary Frost, and is one of the great blogs from the time before blogs were so called. Gary is one of the big thinkers and great practitioners in conservation and preservation.

Here’s the quotation, slightly amended for clarity, but do yourself a favor, and read more at http://futureofthebook.com.

Preservation is one of the library and archive community’s big goals, and digital preservation in particular is relatively well supported at present. Still, we should always remember that the technical aspects of preservation that we talk about on these lists are merely synonymous with preservation as it appears in our institutional mission statements.

The high-level, “intrinsically good” preservation function of libraries consists in having collections under institutional ownership, describing and disclosing their existence, and providing the place or means to use them. It’s important for those of us in the preservation trenches to keep in mind that the library basically gets up and goes each day – links resolve, PDFs are downloaded, images are viewed, databases are queried, books are checked out, articles are read – without any direct effort on the part of the preservation department.

A lot of preservation work (in digital preservation especially) is speculative, asking questions about how long the present state of affairs will continue, what will be necessary for that continuation, and how changes can be made gracefully. As a result, I would suggest that the only realistic conversation to have about preservation management is how to manage risk in a situation where preservation will always be a primary institutional goal, but a secondary operational priority. If you find that paradoxical, I agree, but I think it has the advantage of being an accurate assessment.

Collections of Record

Some remarks related to two recent snippets from reading about the evolving landscape of shared collections:

From Rick Lugg (http://sampleandhold-r2.blogspot.com/2011/02/misspent-funds-or-strategic-reserve.html)

A strategic reserve of both print and digital scholarship seems an obvious choice. But like the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, this should be coordinated at the national or regional level, and the costs should be borne by the entire community which depends upon that reserve. As a community, we have begun to move in this direction, through participation in trusted print repositories and trusted digital repositories such as Hathi Trust. Investment in these programs, through both dollars and contributed collections, will gradually assure that “misspent funds” are converted to something more lasting and cost-effective.

From Gary Frost (http://futureofthebook.com/2011/01/booknotes-74/)

From remote storage to high density storage to shared print archive, the revamp of the status of print continues. The preservation perspective is in revamp as well. At first the attractions of security and more optimal storage provided benefit. Then the dissolve of classified shelving, more sweeping relocation and disaster risk caused pause. Now systematic discard is pending.

I will add a few notes for preservation management in this context.

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Art Space Tokyo!

I am very excited to say that I am backing of a Kickstarter project to reprint Art Space Tokyo. This exquisite book was originally published by Chin Music Press, a wonderful group in Seattle. Art Space Tokyo had eluded my grasp for quite some time. The first edition is quickly becoming unavailable and developing some mercurial pricing.

This project will create a revised and updated edition, but given Craig Mod and Ashley Rawlings‘ dedication to the book are and the art of storytelling, I think it is fair to call this a “first edition thus.” The added delight of crowd-sourced-patronage provenance for a small-press project makes it the completest thing.