Libraries in Times of War, Revolution, and Social Change
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUPThe pillage and burning of Iraq's National Library and its National Museum in the spring of 2003 sent cultural shock waves around the world. "Stuff happens," Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. Secretary for Defense, declared offhandedly, dismissing these events.1 But such events, and the variety of responses that they evoke, raise a number of urgent historical questions to which the articles in this volume represent tentative answers.
The collections and services of libraries and related agencies, such as museums and archives, are important components of social and institutional memory. They are both physical places of intellectual work and highly symbolic places. They represent national and cultural identity and aspirations. They are venues for individualized access to educational and cultural resources. They are also part of an infrastructural continuum for disseminating information, forming opinion, and providing literate recreation. At one end of the infrastructural continuum lie telecommunications, mass media, and more recently the Internet and the World Wide Web. Libraries have traditionally been situated at the other end of this continuum as places of access to the historical diversity of opinion represented in cumulating collections of printed materials, though in the digital era they are clearly moving to a more central position on this continuum.
Libraries, Information Infrastructure, and Revolution
Those who write (and those who read) the history of wars and revolutions have tended to focus their attention on creating (or consuming) inevitably dramatic narratives. An important aspect of these narratives is the causal framework of antecedent, contemporary, and subsequent political, economic, and social developments by means of which the narratives are given coherence and explanatory power. Each of the large categories that [End Page 361] may be used for historical analysis—-the social welfare of a people, the structure and interaction of social classes, the nature and conditions of the economy and trade, territorial changes, the interrelationships of the institutions of church and state, the mechanisms of government and the national and international dimensions of political relationships, and ideas of patrimony and cultural heritage, for example—-involves at some level an encounter with aspects of the production, communication, and use of information and the mechanisms and practices by means of which such encounters become possible.
It can be argued that information infrastructure—-the organizational arrangements, technologies, and practices by means of which information is routinely generated, disseminated, and used within a society—-is a basic and all pervasive social "glue." Both social continuity and social change are dependent on and are supported by this infrastructure. The great libraries of the past, as part of this infrastructure and in so far as they—-or records of them—-continue to exist, present themselves to us as monuments to the past with all the inertia of warehouses or museums. This is no less true of the great national and research libraries of the present except that they integrate records from the past with those of the present in a distinctive and vital process of historical continuity. Within all of these libraries the recorded heritage of the societies of which they are part gradually accumulates and is preserved and organized for present and future use. Social, cultural, political, religious, and economic practices of every conceivable kind may be reflected in these records. Libraries tie the present—-and what is authorized in the present by being incorporated into the collections of libraries—-to the past. One might say that their function is to appropriate the past for present purposes. Such libraries often represent the intellectual and cultural authority that an individual or an institution has attained. This authority exacts a special kind of social deference both in the historical period in which it is first recognized and subsequently, especially as the library moves from the private to the public sphere.
Our great national and research libraries are subject themselves to what is usually a slow process of change over time in terms...
