Ledarskap och lidelse - Kungliga biblioteket

Finally, it was a seemingly natural tendency in the transition from oral
to written culture to resolve questions of communication and memory on
stage, in the form of theatrical dialogue. There is no question - the digital
arena is nothing but a stage. Not only is the medium the message, but the
stage – presentations with their ubiquity, their perspicacity, their repetitiveness,
once again all features of an oral form of communication.
And it is a stage that not only guarantees communication between actors
and spectators. The culture of oral communication is so omnipresent that
we even have to ensure that we not only talk amongst ourselves, but that
there exist a conversation between the various forms which our vessels of
knowledge take, that they can engage one another.
If we look truthfully back at the world which was our most recent source
of inspiration before the digital age, we see that we have not always been
that successful in creating an environment in which the spoken and written
words, handwritten and printed worlds have coexisted. We need to learn to
speak anew – since we are infants, infans, in the true sense of the word. We
shall accomplish this only by letting our memories speak. Speak memory!
Noter
1This article is a revised version of a keynote address held at the Digital Learning and
Libraries Conference organized by the National Library of Latvia in November 2007.
It addresses issues which have been central to Gunnar Sahlin’s tenure as Head of the
National Librarian of Sweden. Not the least of these is the tremendous shift in the way
in which we engage various media in our historical research and how we can speak of our
historical collections using terminology and concepts from our contemporary culture of
communication.
Om författaren
Jānis Krēsliņš är förste bibliotekarie på Kungl. biblioteket och lägger i sitt arbete
fokus på det äldre trycket. Genom att berika forskarnas och KB-medarbetarnas
kunskaper om KB:s samlingar som forskningsresurs och hitta nya vägar till dem
öppnar han samlingarna för forskning på de områden och frågeställningar som
inte har fått den uppmärksamhet som de har förtjänat.
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