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Books Across Borders and Between Libraries
Miriam Intrator
其他書名
UNESCO and the Politics of Postwar Cultural Reconstruction, 1945--1951
出版City University of New York, 2013
ISBN13035062039781303506208
URLhttp://books.google.com.hk/books?id=g9_hoAEACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api
註釋This dissertation is a history of the emotional, political and technical power of libraries and books in the immediate post-World War II moment, examined through the lens of the reconstruction and rehabilitation activities undertaken by the Libraries Section of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. For UNESCO's founders, since libraries, books and information had been targets of abuse and misuse under fascism, their renewal had to be an area of primary concern in the postwar. In that endeavor UNESCO faced, on the one hand, urgent demand for both replacement and new, up-to-date sources of information and publications, and on the other hand, issues of censorship, ownership and rights over confiscated, stolen and other displaced materials. National and international priorities regarding book distribution and the renewal and expansion of libraries intersected with early Cold War intergovernmental conflicts within the transnational forum of UNESCO; its leadership, staff and collaborators sought to achieve a balance between the organization's universalist mission and the aims of its individual member states. Within that rubric this research examines three themes. First, practical programs to provide libraries with the means to acquire books they wanted and needed; second, proposed programs in which UNESCO would play a mediating role in the delicate, political and often emotional debates over the fate of confiscated and displaced libraries and books; and third, UNESCO's contribution to formulating notions of cultural rights as human rights within the context of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. By honing in on the key actors, immediate aims and long-term goals of the Libraries Section, this study provides nuanced insight into the complexities and specificities of UNESCO's areas of interest, action and inaction during the early postwar, post-Holocaust, Cold War years. Examination of the unprecedented and increasingly global level of transnational, intergovernmental and inter-organizational networking initiated and facilitated by UNESCO for the library world illuminates how international relations and national politics both helped and hindered UNESCO's efforts, and identifies the short- and long-term impact on library and book culture, focusing in particular on the examples of France, Poland, and surviving Jewish Europe.