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T
HIS month
Mediawatching starts off by dusting off swimming costumes, polishing goggles and
ensuring there are no blockages in our snorkels.
News reaches us of a project to create a library of underwater sounds, with marine biologists looking to capture the noise of aquatic life. The Guardian (
https://bit.ly/3tDiytF) reports that the Global Library of Underwater Biological Sounds (GLUBS) will house a repository of sound from seas, lakes rivers and ponds as it seeks to identify the soundtrack to life under water. Scientists believe all 126 species of marine mammals emit sounds, but many fish and other creatures that live in water are also known to make noises. The new library will classify all recorded sounds from water-dwelling creatures, helping scientists to identify new sounds emanating from some of the 132,000 known marine animals. From water to water closets, or at least a very close relation – the earth closet, and the discovery of an early example in one of Suffolk’s libraries. Stradbrooke Library, a former courthouse, was undergoing refurbishment when builders uncovered a Moule’s Victorian Earth Closet. The toilet was patented in 1860 by Henry Moule, and has been lovingly restored by Stradbroke Courthouse trustee Allan Hampson. The newly restored earth closet has also helped the library raise extra funds, with an open day offering users the chance to sit on the throne, for a small donation to library coffers (https://bit. ly/3CmbRjI).
Suffolk’s earth closet has proven that libraries can be the perfect places to ensure longevity of materials, but only if they are properly preserved. Our next piece, supplied by Adrian Smith (along with a cautionary tale) comes from New Scientist, which asks a question about
March 2022
the best way to store images for the next 100 years. Adrian points to one of the accompanying comments from David Holdsworth, who says: “In the late 60s and early 70s, I was involved with the construction of a multi- access operating system for an early computer called the English Electric KDF9. We were proud of this system, and when our machine stopped being used in the mid-70s, the source code was printed out and delivered to a university library for safekeeping. “In the early 2000s, a group of us ‘rebuilt’ the KDF9 so as to provide meaningful preservation of one of its systems. This was successful, and led to the desire to emulate the whole multi-access system, thus preserving 1970s-style computing as a museum exhibit. I approached the library for access to the source code printout, but it had disappeared.
“Paper is bulky and although it may physically survive for centuries, it also needs to be housed somewhere with a continuous desire for its survival. At some point, the printout must have seemed inconvenient and of dubious value to someone who had a better use for the space that it occupied. You only need to make this flawed decision once and the material is lost forever.” As any librarian knows, weeding is an important part of the job – but as evidenced above, one person’s weeding is another person’s wanton destruction. And so it was in a recent episode of BBC’s lunchtime drama, Doctors. John Tiernan writes to says: “A storyline in BBC 1’s daytime soap Doctors on 3 March involved a retired ‘head librarian’ stealing books from the fictional West Midlands town of Letherbridge’s public library – under threat of closure – to save them from being pulped. Was this a slightly offbeat nod to World Book Day?” And finally we come to the notion
Take a seat at your local library.
of radicalism, and an article from The DePaulia (
https://bit.ly/3txsXqU), the student newspaper for DePaul University, Chicago. Writer Leslie Williamson asks: “Public libraries are an invaluable part of our communities, and the free access to resources definitely stands out in our capitalist society that primarily prioritizes [sic] profit over accessibility. But, is that enough to make them radical?”
She goes on to look at the ethos of libraries, asking whether anything that is deemed for the “public good”, can be truly seen as radical. She concludes by saying: “We shouldn’t take libraries for granted, and instead look to them as models to strengthen our communities and to better our democracy.” IP
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