The IFLA Committee on Freedom of Access to Information and Freedom of Expression (FAIFE) held a panel discussion Tuesday, August 18, at the World Library and Information Congress in Cape Town on “The Role of Library and Information Workers in a Time of Crisis.”
Simon Edwards, director of professional services for CILIP, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in the UK, said the scope of potential crises that librarians face worldwide is vast, ranging from personal crises to community, national, and global crises that threaten the entire species. “Government agencies also classify crises as sudden (with an immediate impact) and smoldering (a long-term crisis of attrition),” he said. “Libraries play subtly different roles in supporting communities in each.”
An example of a long-term personal crisis where libraries played a vital role was in England, where the Surrey County Council’s program, “Domestic Abuse: How Surrey Libraries Can Help,” won a CILIP Libraries Change Lives Award in 2013. The program included a specialized book collection centered on domestic abuse, self-esteem workshops, poetry sessions with survivors, and a book club.
Edwards said that US libraries in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas played vital roles in providing services before, during, and after the 2005 hurricane season that spawned the devastating tropical storms Katrina, Rita, and Wilma. They served as information and safety hubs that helped people locate individuals, fill out Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) forms, find disaster information, obtain supplies, and recharge electronic devices. One single library in the region, he said, claimed to have helped 45,000 people file FEMA claims, voluntarily “taking on this role through the public services ethos of the library staff.”
He quoted Times (UK) columnist Caitlin Moran, who wrote in her 2012 essay “Libraries: Cathedrals of Our Souls”: “A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft, and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold, rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen, instead.”
IFLA Policy and Projects Officer Julia Brungs said that “documentary heritage is often a primary or secondary target during a conflict. IFLA works closely with the Blue Shield international organization and UNESCO in affected regions and countries” to minimize damage to cultural heritage. After the devastating April 25 earthquake that destroyed library buildings and books in Nepal, IFLA worked to find funding sources in the region to help the Nepalese rebuild their libraries and restore their collections.
Brungs said that IFLA was building an online Risk Register for Documentary Cultural Heritage that identifies unique collections worldwide so that when a natural or man-made disaster strikes in the area, heritage workers will be able to respond more quickly to determine the extent of the damage. “This is a secure database that is not accessible by anyone but the IFLA staff,” she said.
Information heroes and heroines
Information Science Professor Archie L. Dick of the University of Pretoria, author of The Hidden History of South Africa’s Book and Reading Cultures (UKZN Press, 2015), offered a rare glimpse of librarians and crises in both the old and the new South Africa.
Dick told the story of Albie Sachs, an activist and a former judge on the Constitutional Court of South Africa, who as a young lawyer defending clients charged under apartheid statutes was arrested and placed in solitary confinement for five months in October 1963. Sachs was only given a bible to read, but sometime later by order of the Supreme Court he was allowed further reading material. He wrote down a list of the titles he wanted, which was then taken to the Cape Town City Libraries. He dedicated his address at the 2007 IFLA conference in Durban to “the unknown librarian . . . probably she, who provided me with these marvelous books. She never knew she was doing it, but she was saving me. Without those books I would not have survived my detention . . . my spirit and soul would have been destroyed.”
Dick said he always wondered who that unknown librarian was, so after many inquiries he identified the late Mr. J. P. Nolan as the Cape Town library professional who, perhaps unwittingly, helped Albie Sachs during his personal crisis.
“Other information heroes and heroines of old South Africa,” Dick said, “included Jill Ogilvie, an unassuming reference librarian at the Johannesburg City Library. After UK photographer Quentin Jacobsen was arrested in 1971, prosecutors at his trial tried to show he had subversive books in his possession. But Ogilvie, subpoenaed as a witness, pointed out that all of the books were freely available in the reference section of the library.” Jacobsen was acquitted.
Dick also mentioned Annica van Gylswyk, archivist at the Documentation Centre for African Studies at the University of South Africa in Pretoria, who was detained in mid-1986 after security police visited the center. “She was interrogated for seven weeks in Johannesburg Prison,” Dick said, largely because of her travels as a collector of anti-apartheid materials. Because she was a Swedish citizen (even though she had lived in South Africa for 30 years), van Gylswyk was deported. When she returned in 1998, she set up an archive on Robben Island that thoroughly documented the administration of the prison there.
Even in the new South Africa, libraries are under threat. Beginning in 2005, more than 20 public libraries have been either burned down or severely damaged as a result of public demonstrations, mostly through dissatisfaction with government services.
One Robben Island prisoner, Dick said, was Sedick Isaacs, who obtained a correspondence library degree from the University of South Africa and ran the prison library in the 1970s. He was skilled at obtaining subversive materials for other political prisoners and managed to convince the wardens that “Karl Marx’s Das Kapital was acceptable because it was a book about money.” Isaacs revealed that the communist prisoners would steal anticommunist books from the library, while anticommunist prisoners would steal the communist books.
Dick said that even in the new South Africa, libraries are under threat. Beginning in 2005, more than 20 public libraries have been either burned down or severely damaged as a result of public demonstrations, mostly through dissatisfaction with government services. “The local libraries become irrational targets because they are associated with Council policies,” Dick said. “Seven libraries were destroyed in Gauteng Province in the past three years.”
Freedom of information and expression is still vulnerable under democracy, Dick said. A controversial law, the Protection of State Information Bill (also known as the Secrecy Act) would regulate the classification and dissemination of government information, though critics have pointed out several provisions that undermine access to documents and threaten the rights of journalists and whistleblowers who could be placed in jail from three to 25 years. Although it was passed by the National Assembly in 2013, Dick said, President Jacob Zuma refused to sign it into law.
“There are signs that the bill will be reintroduced,” he said. “Librarians remember that book censorship often follows soon after such legislation is passed.”
