Libraries in Times of Utopian Thoughts and Social Protests—The Libraries of the Late 1960s and Early 1970s (review)

Young twenty- and thirty-somethings now wear garb from the sixties and seventies to costumed events, little aware that to persons of a certain age (including their own parents) these clothes were a political statement as well as fashion. Similarly, among that aging cohort of baby boomers, the "student revolution" of the 1960s and 1970s encompasses a national as well as a personal level of experience. Unfortunately, as a nation, Americans are provincial when they are not xenophobic—long may we lament the demise of foreign-language requirements in academe and the inadequate attention to the proprieties of English in the anti-elite era of inclusiveness.

Portions of the present-day library establishment have regressed to blind nativism in the past forty years, for all the rhetoric expended on that shibboleth "global information" and even though that lapse may be subconscious. Comparative librarianship is all but absent from U.S. library and information science curricula, for example, since it has been crowded out by technological subjects of the moment. This collation of international conference papers demonstrates, among other things, the profundity of that loss. Even among those active in the front lines of political protest in the 1960s or in the American Library Association in the early 1970s, many are probably unaware of the more profound political implications that the student rebellion had in Europe or in other parts of the world. Not by accident did Chairman Mao destroy the libraries and the American library school founded by Mary Ellen Wood during China's cultural revolution. How central libraries are to social and political stakes, however, remains a matter of indifference and contention to the present day.

The conference whose proceedings these papers represent was made possible by the University College of Borås, the International Federation of Librarians (IFLA), and Nordbok (the Nordic Literature and Library Committee). The countries (and speakers) included cover a wider range of cultures than might be expected: Kenya, Africa (Shiraz Durrani), Australia (Judy Claydon), Mexico (Valentino Morales-López), and Romania (Hermina G. B. Anghelescu) are the most exotic. Among western and northern European nations, France, Italy, and Spain are not represented, and the paper by Alistair Black (United Kingdom) has been published elsewhere. The presence of The Netherlands (Marian Koren), Germany (Peter Vodosek), Finland (Ilkka Mäkinen), Greenland (Elisa Jerimiassen), Denmark (Ole Harbo on Danish librarianship, Pierre Evald on Biblioteksdebat, the "activist" Danish library journal of the era), and Sweden (Lennart Wettmark) would seem to indicate that the conference was dominated by a Germanic/Nordic nexus, except that seven papers representing various aspects of American library history were presented at the conference, four of which (Fred Stielow on Sydney Ditzion's The Arsenals of a Democratic Culture, Loriene Roy on the development of tribal libraries since the late 1960s, Donald G. Davis on the Mississippi Freedom Libraries, and a delightful personal memoir from Terry Weech) appear here. Bill Lukenbill and Irene Owens published their papers in another journal, while Toni Samek's paper on the American library alternative press experiment was published in fuller form as part of her book on intellectual freedom during the 1969-74 period. Happily, all of the U.S. papers are well written and researched.

Magnus Tortensson, senior lecturer at the host institution, the Department of Library and Information Science at the University College of Borås (Sweden), explains well why the balance of papers seems to favor Western "developed" countries. Some of these countries were still recovering from World War II in 1960. I visited London in 1956, when many landmarks since restored were propped up and shells of buildings, not to mention ominous empty...