Importance of preserving knowledge and the WCML

Through volunteering with the Working Class Movement library, I was asked to give a book recommendation for the Manchester International Festival that will take place next year. They are gathering 20,000 books to give to the people that attend the festival that have shaped British politics. 

I suggested William Morris's News from Nowhere, but through talking to other library members I got lots of good book recommendations so I have gone and got them. One thing I do find I spend lots of my time doing is trying to find good books either about the working-class or written by a working-class person, they're not easy to find so the talk was very helpful to me. 

The book pictured was mentioned as it details the importance of preserving knowledge and how important archiving and libraries are, as this is what I want to do I got a copy, it's relatively new and is written by Richard Ovenden who is one of the librarians at the Bodleian Library. 

Each chapter details a catastrophic event where either books are burnt or libraries are destroyed, but it shows the importance of keeping valuable archives and records and how in the past whole countries have been stunted in growth through the loss of books. 

Some quotes I have found relevant. 

pg. 5 - 'Windrush landing cards documenting the arrival into the UK had been deliberately destroyed by the Home Office in 2010 shows the importance of archives.' 'By spring 2018 the Home Office had admitted to the wrongful deportation of at least 83 of these citizens, 11 of whom had died.'

pg.12 - 'The library... run by local government... funded from local taxation under the legal provisions that were first set out by the Public Libraries Act of 1850. There was political opposition to the idea a the time. Colonel Sibthorp was sceptical of the importance of reading to the working-classes, on the grounds, that he himself did not like reading at all and hated it while at Oxford.' 

'The Kenyan Emergency, as the Mau Mau rebellion was euphemistically referred to by the British, forced an approach to records kept in Kenya involving a process of retention and disposal that was inherently racist: only officers that were 'British subjects of European descent' were allowed to decide whether to keep or destroy them. The implication is that it was not 'safe' to allow Africans to decide the fate of their own history.' 

'In April 2019 the Vote Leave campaign deleted a great deal of content from their public website, including references to that campaign's promise to spend £350 million a week on the NHS if Britain left the EU, a promise that by 2019 had become increasingly controversial. Fortunately the UK Web Archive had captured the website before that content was deleted.' 

'There is no political power without power over the archive.' - Jacques Derrida from the Archive Fever. 

'The next attack on knowledge is about to happen, but if we can give libraries, archives and the people who work in them enough support they will continue to protect knowledge and make it available to everyone.'