INTERVIEW ‘‘
If knowledge is to be safeguarded and made accessible to all, libraries across the entire sector have a vital role to play.
Sue Williamson.
How Libraries have been impacted by war, conflict, and looting and the implications for society
Immediate Past President and current CILIP Board member Sue Williamson looks at the impact of conflict and turmoil on access to knowledge and information. Drawing from the past and looking at the present she asks what library services can learn about protecting libraries’ safe spaces.
AS the Chinese saying goes, “We live in inter- esting times”. After many years of relatively settled geopolitics, we are currently seeing instances of conflict and destruction with the world becoming a much more unsettled place. With this very much at the forefront of my mind, in early February, I went to a talk at the Oxford and Cambridge Club by the esteemed historian and librarian, Dr Alice Prochaska. The talk addressed the importance, and vulnerability, of libraries and archives, and was entitled ‘Libraries and Warfare: Loss, Loot and Restitution’. This seemed to me to be a very timely subject for a lecture.
Dr Prochaska attended Somerville College, Oxford where she gained a degree in Modern History, which she then followed with a D Phil. From 1992 to 2001 she served as Director of Special Collections at the British Library. She then took up the position of University Librarian at Yale University in Connecti- cut, one of the great research libraries of the world, where she remained until August 2010, before returning to the UK to take up the post of Principal of Somerville College, which she held until 2017. Her current scholarly interest focuses on the history of cultural restitution, and the relationship between national heritage and national identity, with a special interest in the period of the Second World War. During a period of sabbatical leave prior to leaving Yale in 2010, she researched the subject of cultural restitution and the roots, especially in World War II, of modern approaches to international
Summer 2025
heritage and the ownership of cultural assets: a field with which she became familiar as a practitioner during her period of service at the British Library, and on which she has researched and published since then.
My daughter recently gave me a book for my birthday entitled The Lost Book of Bonn by Brianna Labuskes. While the primary storyline is about internal resist- ance to the Nazis, this book has a secondary theme highlighting the work done to restore books and col- lections looted by the Nazis in World War Two by an organisation called the Offenbach Depot, supported by the Library of Congress in the USA. We know and hear a lot about the art that was looted by the Nazis, but less about the books and collections that were desecrated in this way.
In the novel, there is a discussion about the value of a particular copy of a book when it can simply be reprinted. The narrator and main character con- cludes that the value is rooted in emotional attach- ment rather than consumer demand. “The books that people held on to – the ones they read so many times their spines became creased and their ink smudged – were a glimpse into some- one’s soul. These were the books that had gotten them through their deepest grief, that brought back their happiest memories, helped them raise their children and guided them through life’s hardest questions.” In the author’s note at the end of the book, Ms Labuskes references a report written following an
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