User:Book/BlogEntry: 2007 September 03 07:04:05 EAT

From KLAMediaWiki

Jo Labadie, Detroits's anarchist labour leader, donated his personal papers and library to the University of Michigan in 1911. This was the beginning of a great collection of documents on radical history (The Labadie Collection). Elaine Harger, a member of Progressive Librarians (USA), contacted Julie Herrada, its curator, about the possibility of depositing materials collected by librarians during the first US Social Forum (Atlanta 27 June- 1 July 2007) at Labadie. Julie Herrada's response was positive, and so the leaflets, brochures, booklets etc. were dispatched to Detroit when the post office opened on Monday morning after the USSF. Discussions have started on whether the physical documents, which were gathered by seventy East African librarians during the Nairobi WSF in January, should also be deposited with the Labadie Collection. Julie Herrada likes the idea, and so does Roberto Savio, the chair of the WSF's Communications Commission, when asked by email.

For natural reasons, the staff of Kenya Library Association, who managed the documentation work on the ground in Nairobi, is more hesitant. We need to know which role we must play in the archive and how we can benefit from it being so far, says Esther Obachi, the secretary of the KLA.

Esther Obachi has recently published the first printed manual for librarians who participate in Social Forums with a view of contributing to its documentation in libraries and archives. The booklet is called "Creating a knowledge Base from the World Social Forum. A manual for Library and Information Professionals" (published by KLA, PO Box 46031, 00100 Nairobi, Kenya).

Preserving physical documents from the social forums for posterity is a goal of NIGD's library project. ( About NIGD's library project, see http://www.nigd.org/libraries .) An open question is the potential role of librarians and libraries in the ongoing processes and activities of the social forum(s). The library should take up the cases, says Finnish library activist Mikael Böök. He proposes that libraries proactively start to keep track of the thousand of activities started by participants in the social forum. Wiki-powered websites like http://www.wsflibrary.org/ should provide a Civipedia of ongoing social forum workshops and this project should be run by librarians, says Mikael Böök.