Caribbean Libraries in the Twenty‐First Century: Changes, Challenges and Choices

Citation

McIlwaine, J. (2008), "Caribbean Libraries in the Twenty‐First Century: Changes, Challenges and Choices", Library Review, Vol. 57 No. 9, pp. 740-742. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530810911897

As both the foreword and the preface to this work emphasize there has been very little previous writing about librarianship in the Caribbean with Alma Jordan's The Development of Library Service in the West Indies through Interlibrary Cooperation (Metuchen, NJ, Scarecrow Press, 1970) a lonely and much cited exception. One can therefore only applaud the initiative and industry of the editors in producing the present volume. The organization of its content as described in the preface sounds like a major military campaign: collecting 36 proposals from 55 contributors, whittling these down to 25 papers from 41 authors and having these reviewed by a panel of four external reviewers: past and present University Librarians of the University of the West Indies (UWI), Stephney Ferguson and Margaret Rouse‐Jones and well‐known UK professional figures Derek Law and Maurice Line.

The final volume is divided into eight sections and given the diversity of coverage a summary of their contents follows: historical perspectives (library development in the Dutch‐speaking Caribbean, rural libraries in Trinidad and Tobago, academic libraries in the Bahamas); management of collections, staff and services (academic libraries in Jamaica and Barbados, school libraries in Jamaica, use of the Moys classification scheme); innovative services (services for the blind in Trinidad and Tobago; rural libraries in Jamaica; information services in agricultural libraries); integration and impact of information technology (in academic libraries in Guyana and public libraries in Jamaica, and digitization initiatives in Trinidad and Tobago); library cooperation and resource‐sharing (college libraries in Jamaica, Caribbean‐related collections in the USA, building a digital library of the Caribbean); education and training of library users (information literacy, academic libraries in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas); distance education (college libraries in Jamaica and the Bahamas, distance learning from the UWI Jamaica campus); Caribbean librarians (professional writing by staff of UWI, Trinidad and Tobago, change management at the Caribbean Knowledge Management Centre).

Contributors range from senior respected figures well‐known on the international circuit (e.g. Jennifer Joseph of Trinidad and Tobago, Hermine Salmon of Jamaica) to three students from the University of Michigan's School of Information reporting on their two‐month‐investigation of the rural library service in Jamaica. Initially it is a surprise after reading the editors” intention to “tap the burgeoning and established writing talents of library and information professionals within the Caribbean region” to find that no fewer than 12 contributors are from the USA and four from Canada, but closer inspection shows that many of these are co‐authors and that only five of the 25 articles lack a Caribbean‐based contributor. The editors themselves provide a useful bridge: one is on the staff of the UWI campus in Trinidad and Tobago, the second began working in the same library but is now at Nova Southeastern University, Florida.

The emphasis of the papers very much follows the publication's sub‐title: identifying problems, mostly related to “service activities”, and discussing solutions. No fewer than 11 of the contributions are substantially based upon specific investigations, mostly questionnaires, which are analysed and reported upon and not a little of the publication's value lies in getting this sort of work into the wider domain.

Inevitably any work of collected essays such as this is going to be uneven both in coverage and content. As regards content, we are not told how the original 36 suggestions were solicited: did the editors write round and suggest specific topics or did they merely advertise for proposals? Gaps in coverage may well simply represent a lack of volunteers or of suitable quality to meet the editorial standards. While it is very refreshing to have contributions on the Dutch‐speaking Caribbean, there is no contribution at all, or even passing reference to the Spanish‐speaking or the French‐speaking areas (perhaps the problem of language?). As regards items on the English‐speaking areas, the big four, Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana, all feature prominently (although the index entry for the last is misleadingly minimalist), while the Bahamas is treated in three papers, but there is virtually nothing on or from the smaller islands of the Leewards and Windwards, where there are unique problems – rebuilding services in Montserrat under the shadow of the volcano; and impressive solutions – the public library in Nevis, for example.

In defence, I am sure the editors would very legitimately say that the papers included are looking at issues and their conclusions should be applicable in national contexts other than those specifically discussed. I was sorry that there was no specific coverage of issues of preservation and conservation since one of the editors, Shamin Renwick, is very well aware of these, having been the local organizer of an IFLA‐sponsored conference on disaster management in Port of Spain in 2005. Naturally the paper on digitization initiatives in Trinidad and Tobago has preservation implications. Related to this, it would have been good to see more coverage of historic and heritage collections and their maintenance. The accumulated resources of local collections in libraries, museums and archives (the two last usually with their own libraries) are of major importance, and with their own problems of access and preservation.

The digitization paper noted above whets one's appetite with a note on some of the private papers collections in the UWI St. Augustine Campus, and “Ephemera and the academic library” looking at the work of the Cave Hill Campus Library is a fascinating and totally convincing argument for collecting and retaining such material (particularly since two of the examples cited relate to cricket!). On the other hand, the piece on “The Caribbean library in diaspora”, basically describing how a collection on Caribbean literature developed mostly in the 1940s and 1950s by a Jamaican judge came to be acquired by the University of Illinois at Chicago in the 1990s is disappointing both in the errors and misconceptions of its background discussion and in its over‐long justification of the removal of this heritage collection from its point of origin – no local collection was prepared to buy it, and the library is making digitized images from the collection the basis of an images of the Caribbean database which will be available to all.

Overall the work is an outstanding success and should give food for thought to Caribbean librarians for decades to come (and to the wider professional community interested in problems of information provision in regions of disparate mini‐states). I hope its reception will be such that the editors will be encouraged to return to their labours and give us a second compilation looking at other issues and other contexts.