Re: [-empyre-] Who decides and what to preserve

["949Simon Pockley" <simonpockley@hotmail.com>]

Earlier, I promised a story about the importance of cultural values:

Within the Dublin Core community, a question often crops up (in the 
interstices of discussion around metadata stuff) about the degree of 
enthusiasm for metadata standards within different cultures. The Brits, 
Australians (NZ as well) and the Nordics were early adopters of the Dublin 
Core whereas the Latin countries have very little interest in any form of 
international standard. Why is this so?

A woman who had been a librarian in Nicaragua told me a story about a 
wealthy benefactor who had left a large collection of his books to the 
central Library. In Australia, as in most European countries such a 
collection would have been mapped against existing holdings, selected titles 
accessioned into the library and catalogued according to subject and then 
labelled so that they could be physically stored with like titles. At least 
I think that?s how it goes. NLA folk might need to correct me on the 
details.

This is not what happened in Nicaragua. What was important there was not so 
much the content of the books, or their condition, but the way that their 
owner had them arranged. A separate wing was built and the entire library 
was displayed in exactly the order and layout in which the collection had 
been assembled.

The things selected were not fragments of atomised content but the qualities 
of a relationship of a man to his books.

I would be the first to acknowledge that the warriors and heroes of this 
information age are the librarians with their sifting and sorting skills. 
But by necessity we have all become librarians. Should we be talking more 
about our relationship to this vast datascape that we keep at our 
fingertips?

Best wishes

Simon

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