National Libraries
Editorial
Stabroek News
October 27, 2002
Writing in the Sunday Times last week, Ben McIntyre said "the very act of assembling books is a supreme gesture of civilization." He made that comment in reference to the opening of the new library in Alexandria sponsored by the Egyptian government and UNESCO and intended to be a "lighthouse for thought." He described how the very first library at Alexandria - a prototype for modern national libraries, it might be added - "was created as an act of state, to make Alexandria the finest city in the world and set in train the first international brain drain."
The Egyptian city's library, sadly for posterity, was eventually consigned to the flames on more than one occasion. Julius Caesar, some Christians and Caliph Omar all destroyed in their turn the accumulated knowledge of several civilizations. That too, wrote McIntyre, had propaganda value. But just a libraries were statements of power, so was their destruction.
Except in Guyana, of course. Here, with a few exceptions, book collections tend to moulder away neglected into oblivion, a reflection of the impotence of the authorities, rather than their power. In fairness, a distinction has to be drawn between a national library and a public library. The main functions of the former are collection and conservation, while the purpose of the latter is to make reading matter available to the public. As indicated above, the earliest libraries, like the one in Alexandria, fall into the first category, their scrolls and tablets being accessible only to scholars or some other restricted group. It was the Greeks and Romans who democratised libraries, and our public libraries come within this tradition.
In Guyana the present National Library combines the functions of a national as well as a public library. The former public library was conferred with the title 'National' in the 1970s but, except for the first few years, was never allocated the resources that would have enabled it to discharge adequately its new functions.
Guyana, of course, cannot preserve books containing the knowledge of the ages across civilizations. But its National Library should be funded at a level that would allow it to acquire most works about Guyana or by Guyanese.
There is a compulsory deposit requirement on the statute books for Guyanese imprints, but so much material on Guyana is published outside this country that without funds for acquisitions, it will be difficult for the library to keep abreast of them all.
A bigger problem is antiquarian acquisitions - one of the things that would attract scholars to this country, just as they have been through the ages to all ancient collections. The last major acquisitions of antiquarian works by the National Library were in the mid 1970s, some of the books coming in as a consequence of the dissolution of the RA&CS library, and the bulk from purchases on the antiquarian market with money voted by Cabinet.
The works went into the locked cases of the Reference section, where presumably they still are. However, no special facilities were provided for them, and given the privations the National Library has had to endure over the years, and the vagaries of our tropical climate, it can be safely assumed that these valuable books have been deteriorating slowly but surely.
One of the great missed opportunities was when the present Government voted a subvention contributing to the construction of the new wing of the library. Their foresightedness can only be commended. However, despite the modern facilities for technical services and a conference centre, for example, nothing was done for the antiquarian collection. A true National Library is an expensive investment, but there are ways, as the British Library knows only too well, of recouping some of that investment with the application of a little imagination.
The first step that the Government should consider is to craft a policy for the development of the National Library - as opposed to the Public Library portion - and work out the kind of resources which would be required to make the institution truly a centre of knowledge on Guyana, and to preserve for future generations the local inheritance of the printed word.
The administration has already demonstrated its commitment to public library development. Let it not stop there.
Let it direct its attention to national library development as well. Let it, like the Government of Egypt, make its "supreme gesture of civilization."