Libraries are under attack around the world. This includes libraries in the Bible Belt where evangelicals want to control what people can read according to their own agenda.
Libraries are also attacked by a thousand budget cuts, right-wing extremists who abhor the freedom to know, and in some places, like Bosnia Herzegovina by actual bombs.
According to Richard Ovenden in his lecture at the Toronto Public Library,
“We are going through a profound shift in the way that knowledge is created, shared and stored at the moment. As a result, public knowledge is increasingly in the hands of major technologies, or what the Oxford historian, Timothy Garton Ash , has called “private super powers.”
That really is an appropriate phrase for an age in which private individuals are taking over the world of so much that used to be solely within the public domain, including space travel, policing, armed forces, universities, hospitals, and so much else. The private domain is expanding with electric speed, while the public realm, after decades of neo-liberal ideological dominance is shrinking to the size of a modest bath tub like the wealthy had hoped. Think about it—recently a private army marched on Moscow and the leader Putin cringed and made a deal with Prigozhin. That would have been unimaginable a mere 5 years ago. Now people shrug at the insolence. What else is new, or as Bob Dylan said, “what else can you show me?”
Ovenden also mentioned how archives have changed in the modern age of emails, Twitter (now X), Tik Tok, and other new social media. Who ever thought presidents of the richest most powerful country in the world would communicate directly to his fevered followers on Twitter or Truth Social at 3 a.m. clearly without the benefit of any curation or communications advice? In fact, such communications are not just made without such advice, but probably against such advice!
We have also seen a former president of the US, Donald Trump, housing classified materials in the washrooms of his private club and then bragging about it to his swooning cronies. Life doesn’t get much crazier than this. Is that how Trump was creating his presidential library in the age of social media and fake news?
The examples of President Trump and President Biden and Vice-President Pence each moving state documents to their private homes highlights the problems of mixing up private and public archives so casually. How can such a society carry on? Are these each merely one more example of the decline of modern democracies?
Another example was provided by Ovenden:
“The current investigation by the British House of Commons into former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s administration during the COVID-19 crisis, focusing on messages exchanged by senior figures, highlights the critical importance of these records for the health of our democracy. They used encrypted messaging systems like WhatsApp, and Telegram to evade the normal routine of keeping records in their department, evading the Freedom of Information regimes, and long-term archiving.”
To quote Dylan again, ‘The Times they are a-changing.” And they will never be the same again and we had better make sure we protect our freedom to read from challenges posed by a wide variety of sources. We must do this at our peril.