In the wake of tragic events and the eventual removal of memorials—be they ephemeral by design or “permanent” markers that no longer suit contemporary needs—it often falls to librarians and archivists to make sense of the mass of papers, paraphernalia and stories that appear. Libraries being repositories of knowledge, history, and stories, it seems remiss for this oversight to exist within the field’s body of research. Every time that a memorial develops, we are presented with visceral reminders of the physicality of grief. As contemporary culture continues to become more aware and mindful of death’s presence in everyday existence, it is important to bring a wide variety of academic approaches to the study of death and grief.
In the field of librarianship, the archive is often considered to serve as a memory space with its mission being to organise and memorialise the past and bring attention to the stories that these collections contain. One of the problems inherent in this selection process is the determination of what gets archived—which objects are deemed worth saving and by what criteria. Depending on who makes these guidelines, entire histories or groups of people can be left behind. This is true, too, of how we document the objects in our collections: the metadata we generate to facilitate findability often overlook those once seen as tangential or subsidiary.
This volume brings together 20 essays by 28 contributors focusing on the various ways in which libraries and archives function as spaces for individual and collective grief processing, mourning, and memorialisation. Addressing humanistic materials through social scientific lenses, the authors take a critical librarianship approach to transdisciplinary issues at the intersection of material culture and death studies. Exploring themes of archival silence, community archiving, and loss, these essays address a variety of cases in which the library plays a central and phenomenological role in collective experiences of death and dying. With chapters covering Covid-19, ecological concerns, child death, ethics and extinction, this collection reveals the many facets of grief and human experience that librarians encounter and incorporate into their daily work.
Librarians employ a wide variety of organisational tools and technological approaches to the creation and dispersion of information and their ability to perform traditional research and data based approaches makes them highly valuable to the intellectual community. For this reason, part of this volume will address the ways in which librarian skill sets can be utilised for nontraditional means of archiving and the ways in which the practice of memorialising can serve a therapeutic function for both individuals and communities. It is the goal of this collection to bring attention to the ways in which librarians and information professionals can contribute further to the scholarship via case studies, theoretical approaches, and recommended paths for future research.
Librarians and archivists work on the front lines when it comes to documenting and preserving many of the objects and stories associated with grief, both personal and collective. Yet their unique perspectives on this topic, which stem from their experiences working directly with these materials, has yet to be covered in related literature. The essays included in this collection represent a wide range of methodological approaches—from more traditionally academic analyses and critical frameworks to coverage of community-engaged scholarship and more personal, reflective essays—reflecting the diverse and transdisciplinary nature of librarianship.
You can pre-order the book here.
Robert Spinelli 