My friend and former colleague, Sjoerd Koopman, retired in 2010 as Director of Professional Programmes at the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA). A great communicator, throughout his career Sjoerd built up an extensive network of colleagues and friends. In 2000 he started collecting postcards depicting libraries throughout the world. Recently, he was interviewed by Kathleen McCook for her blog, Ebla to E-books: The Preservation and Annihilation of Memory. By the time of the interview Sjoerd had collected 17,594 postcards.

Sjoerd receives many duplicates. He donates all his duplicate postcards of US libraries to the American Library Association Archives, at the University of Illinois-Urbana, where they have been digitized. They can be viewed online free of charge.

I’m amazed at how his collection keeps growing. I always look out for postcards for Sjoerd, but the few I can find here in South Africa are almost always duplicates of cards he already has. The displays of postcards on revolving display racks in tourist shops seem to be diminishing. According to the San Francisco chronicle, postcards originated in Austria-Hungary in 1869, and since then billions have been sent all over the world. But the hallowed traditions of buying “wish you were here” postcards while travelling and sending them to friends and family back home seems to be dying out, certainly here. I suppose it’s faster and simpler to make a selfie in front of whatever takes your interest (an extremely annoying habit, IMHO) and tap a button to post it on your social media page. Mark Jenkins, writing in the Qatar Peninsula, observed that in Hong Kong it was easier to find a selfie stick than a postcard.

To me, there is something qualitatively different about sending a postcard. We can be grateful that Sjoerd and other aficionados are preserving this multi-layered relic of a society that is changing in front of our eyes.