Sounds and silences in libraries
A handful of ideas
[This text was presented as a conference at Conferencia RIBCA (Rede Intermunicipal de Bibliotecas de Leitura Pública do Cávado) in Terras de Bouro, Portugal, October 13, 2023].
I was originally invited to this event to talk a bit about the role of digital libraries in preserving the sounds of the indigenous peoples of my home continent.
At first, I had trouble talking about it. A problem of representativeness, above all ―I am not an Indigenous person― but also a problem of exoticism. The same challenges and inconveniences faced by the distant (and quite unknown) First Nations of my homeland are faced by many peasant and rural communities of the Iberian Peninsula. Why talk about the former, then, when we could talk about the latter? Why, if what I was going to say about the former applies perfectly well to the latter?
Curiously, when I started writing this conference, with the above questions in mind, my reflections led me to unexpected horizons. Why continue talking about digital libraries, if the practices (and what we call “innovation”) are also, and have been for a long time, in other places? Why talk only about sound documents, or orality, if documents can also assume many other forms, many of them forgotten or rejected by libraries? Shouldn’t we also be talking about colonization, hegemonies and minority groups when we touch on all these issues? Where are we going, or do we want to go, with this conversation? What do we want to achieve by putting these ideas on the table? What is the point of talking about all this?
When I was finally finished writing, I had a ton of scribbles and a handful of halfway salvageable ideas on paper. Those ideas revolved around sounds and silences in libraries and similar spaces, yes, but they also touched on cognitive colonialism and identity resistance. They were ideas applicable in any context: not only with Latin American indigenous groups, where in fact they have been applied for at least two decades, but also with rural communities and suburbs in Europe, or with “minoritized” groups in North America, to give some easy examples.
These, then, are the ideas that I am going to present. I confess that these are highly personal ideas. They contain more doubts than certainties, and are only intended to invite us to reflect critically on the “why” and “what for” of the disciplines and professions of information management, especially in the field of social memory and sound management.
And of silences. Those silences eternally present in everything we do.
[Continue reading the entire text here, downloading the file from my GoogleDrive].
