Libraries in times of utopian thoughts and social protests: the libraries of the late 1960s and the 1970s

Abstract

The IFLA Round Table on Library History has existed for many years mainly as a body that provides an element of library history programming for the annual IFLA conferences. However, its founder Paul Kaegbein was never content with this limited role and succeeded in occasionally encouraging library historians to put on conferences at other times of the year under the Round Table's flag. One of the most enthusiastic of those conference organizers was Magnus Torstensson, who carried on Kaegbein's tradition with the Boras conference of which the volume under review is the proceedings. The proceedings establish that the conference was a great success· and a credit to both Torstensson and the Round Table. Indeed, one or two of the papers given at the conference do not appear in the proceedings because they have already appeared elsewhere in prestigious journals. The focus on the 1960s and 1970S is an interesting one because it was likely that contributors would include many historians who remembered the 1960s themselves (unless their participation in those heady days had been too wholehearted to allow memory to persist). This seemed to offer the possibility of a conference that was much more than just academic history, and the proceedings suggest that is exactly what happened. In particular, Terry Weech's paper on his own experiences of library education at the University of Illinois during the period showed just how Torstensson was right to feel that there was something sufficiently distinctive about it to merit its own conference. Weech reminds us of the special mood of optimism and activism that was in the air and shows that it did have its impact on the library and information world. Because the conference contributors came from both Europe and other parts of the world in roughly equal numbers, they presented the possibility of looking at the 1960s and 1970S from a good number of perspectives. Papers dealt with fourteen different countries and most of them focused strongly on examining whether or not, in Bob Dylan's words, the times they were a' changing. The answer is, interestingly enough, mixed. In some ways, the most striking paper is Judy Clayden's account of librarians in Australia. She is able to show quite clearly that the profession in Australia was overwhelmingly conservative, and whilst not closed off to technical developments only a few members were interested in the current social issues. Valentino Morales-Lopez shows that, in a slightly similar way, Mexican librarians concentrated on professional developments rather than direct interface with social change. The sequence of papers in the proceedings places Clayden's paper next to Hermina Anghelescu's very different account of the struggles of the Romanian profession to survive under the Ceaucescu dictatorship. Censorship of publications and the use of libraries to support the state propaganda apparatus stultified development and the profession was left poorly trained and powerless to attempt positive effects on society. Neither in Australia, Mexico or Romania, in their different ways, was the profession able to respond to the mood of change. However, at the same time Marian Koren, on the Netherlands, Peter Vodosek on Germany, Ilkka Makinen, on Finland, and Ole Harbo and Pierre Evald, on Denmark, and Lennart