Review of Burning the Books by Richard Ovenden, pub. John Murray 2020

[sheenaghpugh]

“In the UK in 2017-18, funding for public libraries fell by £30 million, over a hundred and thirty libraries closed and five hundred more were run by volunteers rather than professional librarians. We read with horror how the public library of Jaffna was deliberately targeted in an attack aimed at damaging the educational opportunities of a community there, yet all around us public libraries are closing.”

I don’t usually review books that have been noticed in the national press, feeling they don’t need it. If I make an exception here, it is because this “history of knowledge under attack” through the ages by the current Bodley’s Librarian strikes me as probably the most important book that was published last year.

It is a history of the collection, arrangement, use and destruction of information by various people whose motives ranged from the noble to the despicable. It does not stop at books and rolls of papyrus; it encompasses the digital age and indeed these chapters provide a timely warning to those who fondly imagine that because something is online or in the cloud it will be there for ever. When Flickr, in 2019, deleted content from millions of users as a result of a change in policy on free accounts, they may just have lost personal memories, but when in 2017, YouTube destroyed thousands of hours of videos documenting the Syrian Civil War, “precious information was lost, much of it gone for ever”. It may seem obvious that sites operated for commercial gain are not the place to store any information of value, but when other forms of storage may cost money, the temptation is clear.

There are also less evident dangers, resulting both from rapid advances that render technology obsolete and from the fragility of said technology, and in this context the rising tendency of governments to force us to look up everything online should worry us. In 2007, scholars found that “50% of URLs in the public website for the US Supreme Court were broken, suffering from what is called in the digital preservation community, ‘linkrot’. These websites are of huge social importance; how can society behave unless it knows what the laws of the land are?”

There are web archiving organisations, but most are not supported by public funding and are thus vulnerable. Even where there is public funding for the archival of information, whether digital or in book form, it is an easy target for “austerity” cuts. Ovenden demonstrates convincingly and with some passion how oppressive regimes, now and in the past, have always bolstered their power by destroying information or limiting access to it, and still do. He also, while conceding that we cannot keep everything, shows how we may chance, while tidying up, to destroy what might prove to be of enormous use in the future:

“The issue of climate change is perhaps the most urgent facing the world and an important recent study analyses climate data contained in an extraordinary archival record, one that details the grape harvests in Beaune, the wine capital of Burgundy, between 1354 and 2018. There is an incredibly rich set of climate data in these records, going back in an unbroken run, perhaps the longest continuous set of climate records in Europe. Climate scientists have found that they can use this data to show that the frequencies of extreme weather in earlier centuries were outliers, but that these extremes have now become the norm, since an observable shift in the climate since 1988. The records were created by some of the greatest vineyards in the world but are latent with potential for other uses than the ones they were originally created for. We do not always know the value of the knowledge we are losing when it is destroyed or allowed to decay.”

It is alarming to think how easily such records could either have been lost to “rationalisation” or deliberately destroyed by those whose commercial or political interests are served by climate change denial. Being myself a history nut, I expected to find the earlier chapters, dealing with libraries such as those of Nineveh and Alexandria, of most interest. They were indeed absorbing, but I ended up feeling that I was reading not about historical matters but contemporary dangers, or rather, timeless ones, and that these were currently being given nowhere near enough thought, except by Bodley’s Librarian and his colleagues.

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thanks for alerting me to this book.