INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY REHABILITATION AND PLANNING
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb026094 |
| Pages | 174-180 |
| Date | 01 April 1946 |
| Published date | 01 April 1946 |
| Author | THEODORE BESTERMAN |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY REHABILITATION
AND PLANNING1
by THEODORE BESTERMAN
THIS
may at first sight seem to be a subject of somewhat tepid interest, and
so indeed it can be if approached in a conventional spirit. Yet in truth there
can
be
few questions of more fundamental importance. Knowledge, research,
discovery, and indeed our daily life, are all based on that organization of
recorded knowledge which is called documentation, and can be successfully
and efficiently achieved or conducted precisely to the extent that they are
well documented. So much is obvious, but this is only the beginning of the
story. Organized knowledge, and all the things that result from it—in other
words, human civilization as we understand it—is not a thing that exists in
itself.
A living, developing community is inseparable from its records.
History displays only too many civilizations which have died and left their
monuments behind them as melancholy memorials of human decadence and
folly. But the mind cannot even conceive of the opposite
case,
of the survival
of a civilization if the documents, in the widest sense, be destroyed in which
it is recorded.
In short, human culture is not something that necessarily coexists with
man. It
is
rather the result of
a
long, painful, massive, ceaseless accumulation
of records, records which at rare intervals are synthesized by a man of genius,
each such synthesis marking a step forward in human progress.
Natura
non
facit
saltum!:
few tags have
less
of philosophical and biological
truth.
Yet even
these brilliant synthesizing intuitions are based just
as
surely—if not directly—
on the accumulated records as are the pedestrian efforts of succeeding genera-
tions of scholars, of research workers, and of those whose lot is daily toil. It
may indeed be said with perfect truth that civilization, far from being the
powerful and indestructible force it was considered to be in the days of the
romantics, is in fact a fragile growth, as fragile as it is complex, as fragile as
the last surviving great library. Surely not even the most robust optimism
can escape this conclusion in an atomic age.
The function of the librarian must therefore be nothing less than to act as
the conservator of civilization, as well as its propagator. He has before him
two major and supremely important tasks. The first is so to organize the
records of civilization as to enable them to survive at all, and civilization
itself with
them;
the second
is so
to organize
these
records
as
to lead civilization
as rapidly as possible out of a condition of things in which its very survival
becomes problematical. The notion of the librarian as a mere custodian or
intermediary must be scotched once and for
all.
The library is no Fort Knox
in which the precious gold of man's accumulated wisdom is to be preserved
1 Read at the Sixteenth International Conference of the Federation Internationale de
Documentation, Paris, November 1946.
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