This Librarian's Ideal

Earlier this month most of us read or heard about the attempt to destroy medieval manuscripts held in trust for humanity by the citizens and librarians of Timbuktu.  Extremists, intent on eradicating the cultural heritage and communal history of those who participated in the golden age of Arabic and Medieval learning, attempted to burn or otherwise destroy the treasures of that intellectual era.

Fortunately, librarians, family guardians of personal collections, archivists in many of the mosques of Timbuktu, the Library of Congress’ digitization program, heroic citizens of Mali, and French warriors anticipated the vindictive fury and single mindedness of these mindless modern day barbarians.  Many thousands of pieces were smuggled out of the city on donkey carts.  A few were destroyed.

These treasures are irreplaceable and fortunately only a small proportion was physically destroyed. Many pieces had been digitized by forward thinking librarians; others held their preservation as a sacred duty passed through hundreds of generations by families who own private collections.  The manuscripts were protected as the privilege of family honor.  One for our side!

Victories have been few and far between as preservation of a people’s intellectual often meets a very different fate.  The physicality of books, manuscripts, and codex implies their fragility. Electronic media have uncertain permanence.  I can recommend the book The Universal History of the Destruction of Books by Fernando Baez and Alfred MacAdam to get a sense of a sometimes losing battle.

The biggest danger by far is man, especially the fanatics. Conquerors knew that the subjugation of a people required the destruction of the best their civilization has produced—ideas and narrative.  Libraries and archives are almost always targets of incoming barbarians who are intent on seeding the intellectual landscape of conquered peoples with salt.  Small victories do happen though.  Read the fictional account of a rare illustrated Hebrew work in Geraldine Brooks’ excellent People of the Book.

Miracles sometimes occur.  The Archimedes Codex by Reviel Netz and William Noel tells of the miraculous recovery of an unknown work of the Greek mathematician.  Although the scroll had been co-opted for a mediocre prayer book, modern technology was able to recover the greatness written on the palimpsest. Many other masterpieces of Western Intellectual Heritage were not so fortunate.   How many other libraries have been destroyed some in the name of religion, a few by librarians themselves?  How few have been saved?

Too few have been saved despite the aegis of dedicated librarians. Four of the chief tenets of librarianship are the Collection, Preservation, Organization and Dissemination of human knowledge in any form—paper or other media.  It is that secular sacred duty, the preservation of the seeds of knowledge that made the choice of profession for me.  If I could pass that information and means to knowledge on to others, if I could in some way preserve and protect a small portion of that heritage, then that was work worth doing.  Fiction and phone numbers aside, this was to be my real work. Every day I learned from information seekers, humbled by the vast expanse of my ignorance. What an immense intellectual world existed beyond my ken!  Every day I tried to become better, to learn more, to find the seeds of knowledge and to plant them in fertile minds.  In a career now over I hope that I helped a few. I know I fell far short, but that does not mean that the ideal does not persist.  The preservation of Timbuktu’s heritage sustains me; the heroes who risked their lives imbue me with hope.  They are my ideal and ideals are treasure beyond price.