In the Fall 2016 semester Information and Human Rights course in Pratt Institute’s School of Information he question was posed to us “What is the role of information professionals in the world of human rights?” by Professor Rabina. When thinking about this piece, I initially had a bit of an existential crisis when trying to place myself as a soon to be information professional in the scope of the human rights fields. I tried to find an area of intersection between libraries/archives and the human rights fields that I felt comfortable and could see myself working in, and to find features of librarianship that I felt were important to the human rights field: access and research support. These fundamentals of librarianship can help aid human rights related institutions in the work they do across the globe.
When starting to really think critically of this question, I started with looking at the American Library Association (ALA) guidelines for special collections (since many human rights collections fall under the special collections umbrella). This outlines what we as information professionals need to consider when making decisions to benefit our users and collections, which can be applicable to information professionals working in human rights settings. The section on access, which is quote below, in these codes that will be featured in the information and human rights discussion is subsequent paragraphs.
Access to the Collections:
“The library must provide reasonable access to the collections on a nondiscriminatory basis in accordance with pertinent professional standards governing access policies and procedures. To the fullest extent permissible by donor and legal requirements, library access policies should further the goals of scholarship for which the collections are maintained.”
This section of the guidelines is more applicable to information professionals working in institutions with human rights related collections, which can include universities and non-profit organizations. Providing access to human rights related collections just doesn’t benefit major academic researchers, but users who may not typically engage with such material. Access in library terms today can include open access collections and digital collections. Libraries are always striving to allow a wider range of users to be able to have the same access to quality material that academic researchers have without barriers. Several institutions host digital collections of their human rights related holdings, for the sake of this piece we’ll be discussing the efforts of Columbia University and the British Library. Both have made parts of their collections digitally or have grant funded projects that resulted in online collections to their names. Columbia University’s Human Rights Documentation and Research, the Human Rights Web Archive has been preserving important online human rights related resources and preserving them on internet archive for users to access. Currently there is over 700 sites archived that include sites in sixty languages that cover a wide range of human rights related topics. This is just a small, public facing section of Columbia University’s massive human rights collection. Columbia’s collection includes the Amnesty International archives, Raphael Lemkin’s papers (it’s worth noting that the New York Public Library also holds a sizeable collection of his papers), and the Human Rights Watch archive among other notable collections. Information professionals need to ensure that these collections are easily accessible to their users by properly cataloging them or creating an efficient finding aid so that the research community may access them. As we dive deeper into the digital age, Columbia’s librarians may further broaden the access to these records by digitizing them on a massive scale. Which would allow a wider audience to learn from these collections and use them in transformative ways.
Another institution that is committed to promoting access to human rights related collections is the British Library. Through their Endangered Archives program, and grant funded program that allows for collections of “at risk” records of people to be digitized and hosted online, allows users to access to these records without having to make a formal reference appointment. The British Library hosts the digitized records online, which includes photos and paper records for free without any geo-location barriers. Another factor of this project is that the physical collections stay in their country of origin so that they aren’t deprived of their heritage. This library centered project is important not only to the populations whose records are included, but to information professionals is that these works now have a permanent home online hosted by a major national library.
The Endangered Archives program, in my opinion, is VERY significant in terms of our involvement in the human rights field is the goal of the project: to protect the cultural heritage of ethnic groups that are at risk for destruction. Risks for destruction include wartime threats, lack of proper training, threats from opposing forces, and lack of resources. Projects that preserve important records and providing access to them ensure that the heritage of these groups are available to outside groups to learn from, and that they’ll be protected for generations to come. Another project worth noting in the same context of the Endangered Archives program, is the Mamma Haidara Memorial Library Tombouctou Manuscript initiative. The program aimed to protect important manuscripts, with the oldest dating back to the 16th century, from threatening forces by moving them to safer locations and digitizing them. The Manuscripts have since been made available online on a website that details why preserving these manuscripts is important to the cultural heritage of Timbuktu, while emphasizing the importance of providing free access to these documents.
To put all of what I just laid out into an example that shows why our work as information professionals is so important in the human rights field, I’d like to refer to a guest speaker this class had earlier in the semester. Natalie Brant, head of library services for the Open Society Foundation, visited the class to discuss her work with this organization and about the work of the organization in general. In her day to day job she would field reference requests from staff working in various departments, mainly the grant writing area, for human rights related information so that they may advocate for additional funding or support for projects. Requests ranged from raw data sets to detailed studies regarding victims of human rights abuses. These day to day tasks may not seem like much at the time, but they can be a major piece of a larger puzzle. Brant discussed how the Open Society Foundation helped get rape tried as a crime against humanity during the International Crime Tribunal for the Rwandan Genocide during the mid 1990’s, which was the first time rape in the time of conflict as an act of genocide. Open Society’s work bringing justice for these horrific crimes and advocating for victims is still ongoing twenty years later, especially in the Democratic Republic of Congo and victims of the Boko Haram terrorist group. Thinking about how the Rwandan Genocide trial occurred put the work that Natalie does into perspective for me, librarians working in organizations like the Open Society Foundation can make a huge impact in the work that is done in the human rights field. Without an information professional being there to support research and the grant writing process with data and information, requests for funding or institutional support may not be as successful. This would in turn result in the work that an organization like the Open Society Foundation reaching globally to those who are in need of a powerful advocate. The same could be said for academic librarians working in human rights related institutions, they are the backbone to all of the human rights related research that comes out of those institutions. Without their constant collaboration with faculty, the caliber of human rights academic work that comes out of schools like Princeton or Columbia may not exist.
While the roles of information professionals in this field that have been discussed seem small, or even just a gear in a larger machine, our roles as researchers, providers of access, and collection care takers are what causes this kind of work to be done efficiently. Without librarians, researchers could not access important collections like the Raphael Lemkin papers held at the New York Public Library or Columbia University.This emphasis on access makes important cultural heritage collections, like the ones found in the Endangered Archives program, available to users without causing further harm to the material. Without librarians like Natalie Brant, non-profit organizations that provide aid to disenfranchised people may not get the funding or support they need in order to carry out their important work. In writing this piece, I came up with a fine answer to a question that many librarians hear from the general public, “Why do we still need librarians when there’s google?” Without librarians, human rights work could simply not exist in the capacity it does now.
Resources
American Library Association. Standards for Ethical Conduct for Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Librarians, with Guidelines for Institutional Practice in Support of the Standards. (n.d.). Retrieved October 11, 2016, from http://www.ala.org/Template.cfm?Section=speccollections
Askin, K. (2015, March 5). Why Do Crimes Against Women Go Unpunished? Retrieved October 11, 2016, from https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/women-world-remains-extremely-dangerous-place
The British Library. Endangered Archives Program. (n.d.). Retrieved October 11, 2016, from http://eap.bl.uk/
The Center for Human Rights Documentation & Research at Columbia University Libraries. (n.d.). Human Rights Web Archive. Retrieved October 11, 2016, from https://hrwa.cul.columbia.edu/
The Mamma Haidara Memorial Library. (2016). Tombouctou Manuscript Project. Retrieved October 11, 2016, from http://www.tombouctoumanuscripts.org/libraries/the_mamma_haidara_memorial_library/
