Rare find

I started volunteering in a collection at the Queensland Museum last week. Specifically, I'm in the Science Centre, which was merged with the museum years ago. This was the highlight of my day: a nearly ancient book, still intact, resting comfortably in the shelves of the museum. You might imagine, it was a thrill just to see and hold!

Heroic Librarianship

We don't often associate the work of librarians, archivists, or curators as being particularly heroic. Frequently though, they have been, and I've been giving a lot of thought to this in the past few weeks. Most recently, this piece alerted me to the “secret library” maintained by civilians in the ongoing Syrian Civil War. On a related note, ISIL/Daesh has made a tidy profit from smuggling antiquities out of Syria and Iraq [at least, those which are small enough to be portable, as the more monumental ones they simply destroy].

There is in fact a long history of “critical librarianship”, which involves the profession, as custodians of knowledge, preventing it from being destroyed. This is simple enough in the case of pests and natural disasters, but frequently dangerous when humankind is the threat. We have music today from Russian composers who were banned by the Soviet Union; transgender theory is alive and well today, despite it being one of the topics subject to book-burning by the Nazis; plenty of “counter-revolutionary” academic and cultural work was smuggled out of China during the Cultural Revolution, and that's all within the past century.

I was thinking of this recently at an industry forum, with respect to information literacy in the “post truth” era in which we currently find ourselves. Professionals of this industry have a tradition of subversiveness, with the interests of the preservation and advancement of knowledge and culture firmly in mind. My subversive inner child is excited at the prospect!