IN DEPTH
Lesley Pitman.
Libraries under attack, how can we best support colleagues overseas?
What role should organisations and individuals play in supporting colleagues and organisations facing crises overseas? Lesley Pitman, Chair of ILIG, follows up on their spring Members’ Fest webinar and why librarianship is a global profession.
FOR CILIP Members’ Fest this year, we in ILIG (the International Library and Infor- mation Group of CILIP) decided to focus on one of the most difficult questions that we currently face as a community. At a time of increasing attacks on libraries across the world, and an increasingly challenging envi- ronment in the UK, what role might we have as an organisation, and as individuals, in providing support to colleagues facing crisis overseas?
To that end we wanted to use our session to pub- licise some positive initiatives currently under way. For a detailed account of how one such initiative works we were delighted to be joined by Romana Delaporte from an international organisation called Cultural Emergency Response (CER), which pro- vides first line disaster relief to cultural heritage at a time of crisis. There is more on their work below. Before getting into the detail of particular projects, we took a step back to look at CILIP’s approach. Inevitably, most of CILIP’s work is concerned with libraries here at home, but we do also have a remit to operate internationally.
This is most clearly expressed in the International Strategy (
www.cilip.org.uk/page/International), a document that ILIG helped create, which says: “We are part of a global profession, united by our common values and skills. As the UK library and information association, we are committed to playing an active and engaged
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role in the international community.” The International Strategy sets out many ways in which CILIP can play that active and engaged role, but its seventh goal states explicitly “We will continue providing support to the global library, information and knowledge community in times of natural or man-made disaster”.
In the past few years, we have seen several exam- ples of CILIP stepping up to help.
Back in 2020 following the terrible explosion at the port in Beirut, CILIP worked with Assabil, the Lebanese Library Association, to raise funds to help rebuild the city’s libraries. After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 CILIP collaborated closely with the Ukrainian Library Association to support the extraordinary efforts of librarians across Ukraine to provide services under terrifying conditions.
More recently, concerns about events in the United States have led to work on the impact of metadata changes at the Library of Congress; and the Public and Mobile Libraries Group ran an excellent session at the Members’ Fest this year on censorship and book bans in the United States, with useful lessons for any libraries here facing similar problems. (See pp. 46-47)
As ILIG we put out a statement back in January 2024 condemning attacks on libraries wherever they occurred, whether in the physical wars taking place in Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan, or the criminal
June-July 2026
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