Jun 06
29
RBMS Report *** 2006
This year’s RBMS pre-conference was grandly entitled (and subtitled) “Libraries, Archives, and Museums in the Twenty-First Century: Intersecting Missions, Converging Futures?”
Snuggled into Austin, Texas, the conference was a series of heights and troughs. Many of the presentations fell short, but there’s evidence that a younger subset of librarians is starting to show smoother faces at RBMS, and that can only be a good thing. Susan Allen from the Getty Research Institute made a joke that at previous RBMS meetings the average age for attending librarians was “deceased.” I hope we can enliven this field, a little.
Perhaps the most interesting plenary discussion was a talk given by Joseph Sax, James H. House and Hiram H. Hurd Professor of Environmental Regulation, Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley. In it, he argues that France’s exercise of eminent domain is a correct one. That is, in the case of threatened national treasures, the state has the right to intervene.
In the USA, this would mean that the government could have stopped the near auctioning of Martin Luther King’s papers. Of course, that story ended fairly neatly anyway – but an example is, what if a copyright holder and an estate decide to destroy the papers of a prominent national author? In the USA, they would have the right to do so. In France, the government has the right to interject.
In any case, heady stuff. Next year’s theme is “Ephemera.” Postcards from Baltimore, then.