Access Service Excellence and Freedom of Information

For the last seven or eight years, I have spent most of my winter holidays in Eastern Europe. The countries of Eastern Europe are interesting and beautiful for their ancient pasts and natural features, and also for their more recent history as former communist countries.

I don't want to get into my own politics here, but I will say that regardless of my feelings towards Communism in theory, I - like most people - do have a problem with how it has been applied in practice in most places so far, where corruption has run rampant, and people have been forced into nominal equality through fear and through the governments' limiting of access to knowledge and information.

This winter, I visited the Baltic States. One of the places I saw was Grūtas Park, in southern Lithuania. Here is a picture I took of the small "Library" display inside one of the Park's indoor museum areas:



I've seen a lot of libraries, but this "representational" library, with its propaganda and purposefully limited selection, made me think a lot about how the Soviets were so successful in the sciences, and in the technical arts, but did not allow for much individual expression, and blocked any studies that might have a negative affect on peoples' view of the State. This included all sorts of arts and literature, as well as things like sociology, psychology, you name it. And how can any culture truly be deemed successful, or at least advancing apace, when it does not have those things?

So, what does all of this have to do with Access Services? Everything!
Something so fundamental to our work, but that is nonetheless easy to forget in our day-to-day working activities, is that we are professionally responsible for facilitating access to knowledge and information.

In 2010, we tend to take free access for granted. We have the internet, we have a vast network of libraries; we have among our patrons undergraduate students who had not yet been born when the Soviet Union was dissolved!

Now that we all feel very old (ahem!), we should think about what this means for us, especially in terms of Service Excellence. As we serve our patrons, helping them get the materials that they need, we should always keep in the back of our minds the idea that this freedom - both the patrons' freedom to seek knowledge, and the library workers' freedom to help grant access to that knowledge - was not always thus, and in some parts of the world remains elusive still.

So, that's my two cents. Now, where will I go next year....