Peter Johan Lor

In my work in international and comparative librarianship and information work, I make much use of historical material. Some comparative work is purely synchronic, considering  situations across cultures, societies or countries as things stand at a given moment in time, mostly the present or very recently. But if we want to know why things are the way they are and why they differ between the units being compared, we need a diachronic element as well. This lends much more depth to a comparative study.

So I’m grateful to Brett Spencer, editor of the American Library Association Library History Round Table’s blog, for drawing my attention to “International Library History News“. This is the International history page of LHRT News and Notes, the newsletter of the History Round Table.  Continue reading →

In 2016 Raphaëlle Bats contributed an article to an issue of Library trends (vol. 65, no. 2) discussing the responses of French librarians to the terrorist attacks on Charlie hebdo and a Kosher supermarket on 15 January 2015. The LT issue dealt with the theme, “Libraries in the political process and in conflict situations”, and it carried quite diverse contributions from librarians in five countries.  In her article (Bats 2016), Raphaëlle, who is an instructor responsible for international relations at the École nationale supérieure des sciences de l’information et des bibliothèques (enssib), the French national library school, examined the tension between the traditional neutral stance of librarians and their desire to take part (which they did, on a large scale) in the highly political response to the terrorist act, and asked whether the library profession needs to rekindle its activist vocation.

She followed up the theme of librarians’ participation in political activity in her doctoral dissertation, “De la participation à la mobilisation collective, la bibliothèque à la recherche de sa vocation démocratique” (From participation to collective mobilization, the library looking for its own political vocation), which she successfully defended in October 2019, and which was recently published online (Bats 2019). In it she reflected on the trend toward participatory democracy and on the role French public libraries (bibliothèques municipales) might play, pointing to the risks inherent in institutionalizing participation and examining the possible renewal of libraries and the library profession. Continue reading →

In 2027 IFLA will have a big anniversary. It was founded in Edinburgh in 1927, as the International Library and Bibliographical Committee, and only adopted the name, International Federation of Library Associations, two years later, at an international congress in Rome. But officially, IFLA recognizes 1927 as the year in which it was founded. For resources on IFLA’s history, see here.

Library historians don’t only look back. The IFLA Library History Special Interest Group has started preparing for the centenary celebration by embarking on a series of projects on oral histories of the world’s librarians. The series of projects is ambitious and will encompass many approaches. It is hoped that oral histories of librarians will include not only the history of their libraries at the time, but also the librarians’ immersion in social and political issues of their day, and how they faced the new issues presented to the profession at that time.

As part of the project, an open session with theme “Librarians learning from the past to inspire, connect, enable and engage”, is planned for the IFLA World Library and Information Congress in Dublin, Ireland, in August 2020. The call for papers has been published at https://2020.ifla.org/cfp-calls/library-history/.