The labor of librarians (as memory managers, as literacy agents, as cultural promoters or as curators of intangible heritages….) is a service: an activity destined to the satisfaction of a population´s necessities... The necessity to obtain information or education... The necessity to some amusement.... The necessity to satisfy curiosity, to banish the boredom, to bury the sadness or the loneliness... Necessities which could be expressed... or which can remain hidden, waiting for the careful work of a professional of the information.
Librarian services are social services: an activity carried out from the society to the society, managing a social good: our culture. Yes, a social good, which shouldn´t be a commercial good, as far as culture is the heritage of the whole humankind... An intangible communitary heritage...
Of course, we know these ideas. We have read them in a good number of textbooks and journals. We have learnt them in LIS classes. We have listened them in conferences and lectures. But we are still very far from understanding them completely. We are not conscious of the importance of the concept “service”... or maybe we have not accepted that, in fact, our work is a service. And we can find quite a number of good examples which could illustrate these points...
We still can find, in our libraries, the famous bookshelves-keepers, these colleagues who, like Cerberus, fill their time keeping the books ordered, clean... and untouched. They forgot that the reason of the existence of these books are the very hands that will disorder them, the fingers that will turn and crush their pages and the eyes that will look at them curiously.
We still can find, in our libraries, the bureaucratic librarians, lovers of “procedures” and “official channels”, discouragers of reading and culture, barriers between the books and the readers, and responsibles for all the unlucky stereotypes that characterize our profession.
We still can find, in our libraries, the techno-compu-digital librarians, these persons who believe that computers are the whole future for all the people, forgetting that one half of the world´s population will never touch a keyboard.... and forgetting the importance of the human contact, of the conversation with the users, of the necessity to listen the readers´ words for improving the services....
Maybe we don´t find these characters so often... or maybe we should look into a mirror for finding them. Maybe I have exagerated a bit in the description... but as an ancient Galician proverb says... “even if I don´t believe in the reality of this... it does exists !!”.
There are other colleagues who still have not discovered the goblins who live among the shelves, or the whispers and tears of the damaged books, or the spirits of the personages of the novels looking at us curiously when we are alone in the library... But this is not a condemnable question: the magic of the library is just revealed to a few ones, those who have fell in love with the ink and the paper since they are children...
All these colleagues who hadn´t understood the necessity of giving a service to our readers (something very close to giving the whole life...) are becoming real barriers between the texts and the users... And, anyway, I have doubts if they find any pleasure in what they do....
And all those who think in users like “clients” are losing an important part of the meaning of the term “service”... The culture must be given and difussed, not sold... Because it is a good that belongs to all of us. It is our task to make it arrive to every corner of the world. This will be our goal.
Those who undertake our work without a true service vocation will not know the daily miracle of the contact with our readers... And they will never find the real sense of a millennial profession, born to serve, born to be bearer of knowledge.

It is not the fisrt time –and probably it will be not the last one- that I ponder the close relation between our form of understanding reality and the words we use for representing or expressing it. I refer specifically to the terms used in thesauri and classification systems, controled languages intended to codify our universe through a limited set of selected words.
During the last weeks, I have been collaborating with the Universal Decimal Classification Revision Advisory Committee in the elaboraton of a classification scheme of the South American aboriginal languages (and ethnias). These idioms and societies have been neglected and formerly little represented in the tables of UDC (and others, like DDC or LCC). The codes I´m designing will be included (if approved by the Committee) in Auxiliar Tables 1f.
For me, this task became a double challenge. On one hand, I have had to investigate in areas of my own profession with which I have had no previous contact (i.e. thesauri building, documental languages, etc.) and in fields of other sciences (anthropology, ethnology, linguistics...) with which I have had little contact through my studies in History. On the other hand, I had to take decisions about the reality I was intended to represent, and about the terms I wanted to employ.
Maybe you, who read these lines, will think that to write down a classification structure reflecting these language is a simple matter. Maybe. However, since my first contact with this task, I discovered that nobody knows for certain which indigenous languages are still spoken, who use them, where they are, how many speakers are there.... Nobody knows if these languages are still spoken... Nobody knows how are they exactly, how are their inter-relations, if they have their own writting systems or not....
These points show by themselves a wide social and historical problem, which maybe do not touch us directly as librarians, but that should touch us as human beings. For such languages (and their speakers, and the cultures they represent and codify) are a part of our heritage, of our cultural diversity and of our global identity.
But let´s forget this initial problem. My “crisis” started when, after sketching “a grosso modo” the classifcatory tree of native languages, I tried to fill the empty squares with names. I will put an example of my work, so you will be able to understand my confusion...
The “Avá” people inhabit the eastern region of the Salta province (Salta is placed in northwestern Argentina, bordering Bolivia), in a broad phyto-geographical region known as “Chaco”. The local, spanish-speaking people call them “chaguancos” (a word which has become a synonim of “brute” in all the area) or “tembeta” (for the war ornament of the same name that “Avá” men used, in the past, piercing their lower lip). History books, however, perpetuate another name: “chiriguanos”, the Spanish version of the Quechua word “chiriwano”, scornful denomination that “Avá” received during XIV century from their Inka neighbours (and enemies), and which could be translated literally as “frozen shit”. They call themselves “Avá” (“human being(s)”) and they call their language (an Andean-influenced variant of Guarani) “Avá Ñe´é” (“the language of the human being(s)”). Their Chané neighbours, formerly their slaves, call them “Chaya” (shortened form of the Guarani words “Che Yara”, “My Lord”). New history books, attempting to avoid the secular use of these pejorative terms, and respecting local identities, call them “Avá-Guaraní”, setting a distinction with other Guarani-speaking peoples who also inhabit Argentina, like “Mbyá” people, who live in Misiones province, in northeastern Argentina.
Are you already lost? If you are not, we can add to this list the names that “Avá” receive from their neighbours: the western Qolla, the eastern Wichi, the northeastern Chorote and Chulupi (all them also aboriginal people). We also could include the terms that Spaniards conquerors (XVI-XVII centuries) and Argentinian / foreigners historians and anthropologists created for denominating the different tribes and groups of Avá. And finally, we should not forget all the graphic variations of the previous words, like “Chillihuano”, “Chiriwanu” or “Abá”.
Choosing - from this wide spectrum of words - a proper name which could accurately represent this people and their language in an international classification is not a simple task. It is not a question of simple elimination of old fonts, neighbours-given names or graphic variants. In the example shown above, the term “Avá” (the name that people give to themselves) is not known beyond the indigenous and indigenist circles. On the other hand, the name “chiriguano”, the best known and the most reflected in history and anthropology books, is openly pejorative, and it is refused by the “Avá” themselves. The language they speak is known everywhere as “Guarani”, but this is not the denomination used by them to name it. It should also be considered that there are not normalized or official forms (neither in spanish nor in english) for denominating these peoples or these languages: sometimes one is used, sometimes the other, depending on the occasion.
Which reality I must reflect? The same problem is found, repeated, in each one of the Argentinian and Southamerican indigenous groups. It is not a simple question of words: some of these names reflect a long history of oblivion, scorn, aggresion... By naming a thing or a person, we are setting a personal position in relation to the named thing or person. Thus, we must become conscious of the value of the words we employ; we must think about their meaning, and we should be careful in the use of the names of persons and societies...
Here I am, wondering if I should use “Toba” (“big forehead”) or “Qom” (“people”), or if I should use “Tehuelche” (“unsociable people”) or “Aonikenk” (“People”). And I smile when I remember that, in Russian, “German” is “Niemets” (“Dumb”). Definitively, it seems an international problem about which nobody have thought. A problem that, after centuries of continuous and unconscious use, has dissapeared of our minds. But is has not dissapeared of “their” minds, of the mind of “the others”, who are just asking for a little bit of respect.
The Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights of Barcelona (1996, http://www.linguistic-declaration.org/index-gb.htm) points to the necessity of call the languages according to the names the speakers give to them. A little of ethics push me to avoid the pejorative terms. But the question, my big question, is if a thesaurus or a classification system built with “clean” (but sometimes unknown) terms would be useful for the final users.
Maybe it is just a question of trying, for once, if the union of respect + usefulness is possible. Or if, once again, positive values fall under the pressure of suitability.
I promise to share with you the outcomes of my reflections... Meanwhile, here I am, behind the smoke of my pipe, thinking...

To read or to eat? Is that the question?

It happened in 2003 in Salavina, a little village lost in the middle of the dry forests wich border the Dulce river, in southeastern Santiago del Estero (Argentinian province). I was there presenting an advance of my work with aboriginal libraries, in the Annual Congress of Quechua Language and Culture (Quechua is the old language of Incas, and Salavina is placed inside the region where the Quechua Argentinian dialect is still lively spoken). During my speech, someone among the audience raised the hand and, in a quite high voice, told me that my work was really nice, but that “poor indians didn´t need books, but food and this kind of things....”.
After some hours, and despite the “consolation” of several colleagues –who supported my ideas and my work with warm a very logical speeches- I was still stuck. Had I been so blind? Had my work been so useless, so utopian, so ridiculous, so stupid?
The question on discussion is: is reading a useful tool for the development of communities and peoples, or maybe it is just a luxury which could be relegated to a last place when compared with more urgent needs?
I built the answer (this answer that I was not able to give in Salavina) after a good number of months working inside the hard reality of rural, indigenous and disadvantaged urban communities.

The prioritary, urgent, physical necessities of an individual or a society can be satisifed through humanitarian aid... if a more convenient way is not previously found. Many hands would give this help willingly: NGOs, religious groups, (some) governments... The problem, as an old peasant of northern Cordoba (the province where I live) funnily tolds to me, is that “shoes and peas tin cans do not breed”. Indeed, once the tin can is empty and the shoes are worn out, we come back to the departure situation of crisis, waiting again for the aid resources. This chain of events usually lead to unfortunated and dangerous relationships: manipulations or social, political and religious control. Several examples in Argentina and other South American countries clearly demonstrate this point.
Primary needs of disadvantaged communities (food, house, health) must be covered in an balanced way, but this must necessarily be complemented with education and information (and this services could be implemented through the work of a public library). Education allows to build paths and roads to the future, to recover lost identities and dreams, to know rights and duties, to find solutions to problems, and to understand the power of the own hands and the own work. It allows to avoid today´s fall to be repeated tomorrow. It allows to build hopes and projects, and to break chains of humiliating dependence. It allows to give the fish to the hungry people today, but also to teach them to catch tomorrow´s fish. It allows to learn how to breed cattle, to manage seeds and plants, to take profit of natural and human resources, to create work and an infinite spectrum of other possibilities.
So, I believe that it does not exist such a disjunctive between books and food. We do not have to left apart the important matters because of the urgent things. We must keep in mind both of them, giving a just treatment to each one. Reading and writing skills –and the ways they open- are essential acquisitions for every human society. Without them, development is neglected, and even stopped.
But it seems that, as usual, the future and its chances are horizons that can be seen just by a few visionary minds. The rest –including a good number of librarians, and authorities, and governments, and powers, and...- remain solving immediate problems. They cannot see that, by doing this, they are closing loads of doors leading to a future growth.
And sometimes, as I have stated before, this kind of help ends in domination and harmful relationships. Just ask to the aboriginal communities in northeastern Argentina: they are paying with their votes the water they drink, and with their prayers and their faith the books their read. American and German evangelic books....