lawan neoliberalisme dengan perpustakaan

Bagaimana menemukan hubungan antara demokrasi, penguatan budaya politik, neoliberalisme,dan perpustakaan? Robert W. McChesney dalam pengantar di salah satu buku karya Noam Chomsky memberi penjelasan sebagai berikut:

Demokrasi menuntut agar orang merasakan hubungan dengan sesama warga kelompoknya. Hubungan ini menjelma dalam berbagai organisasi dan lembaga non-pasar.

Untuk apa budaya politik diperkuat? warga negara yang berbudaya aktif, kritis, dan partisipatif bisa melawan neoliberalisme yang menginginkan warga negara yang terdepolitisasi yang ditandai dengan apatisme dan sinisme. Pada hakikatnya neoliberalisme adalah musuh utama dari demokrasi partisipatif.

Jika menginginkan budaya politik yang kuat maka harus ada suatu jalan yang menjadi sarana bagi warga negara untuk bertemu, berkomunikasi, dan berinteraksi. Jalan itu berupa kelompok komunitas, perpustakaan, sekolah umum, organisasi antartetangga, koperasi, atau perkumpulan sukarelawan.

Dengan demikian, Perpustakaan merupakan perwujudan komunitas yang berbudaya aktif, terdiri dari kumpulan orang-orang yang kritis dan selalu siap untuk berpartisipasi dalam menciptakan masyarakat sipil yang memiliki acuan moral yang pro demokrasi dan berkekuatan sosial.

Pada titik inilah Perpustakaan ELSAM berusaha mendedikasikan keberadaannya sebagai hub of learning, simpul pembelajaran guna membangun komunitas yang peduli terhadap penegakan dan penyadaran Hak Asasi Manusia, bukan sekedar membangun fisik berisi pengetahuan statis.

Mengkonsentrasikan dirinya di ranah Hak Asasi Manusia sejak 1993, sampai saat ini Perpustakaan ELSAM telah mengkoleksi lebih dari 4000 judul buku pilihan, makalah, prosiding, laporan, dan berkas kasus pelanggaran HAM yang menonjol yang terjadi di Indonesia. Usaha penyadaran akan esensi Hak Asasi Manusia juga didukung dengan penyediaan materi audio visual, yang sampai saat ini berjumlah sekitar 300 judul yang efektif digunakan sebagai alat pelatihan. Semua koleksi tersebut bisa diakses oleh siapapun yang berminat akan penegakan HAM.

LIBRARIANSHIP AND HUMAN RIGHTS

Human genius – lights and shadows of a changeable spirit – is able to
produce the most overwhelming and the most degrading actions. It is either
able for creation or for destruction. Memoricide is an example of the last one.
But from shadows and darkness, light and new hopes can be created. The
crisis and falls, the big defeats and the most miserable situations can turn
into generative factors – despite all – of the greatest opportunities. The
destruction – intentional or not – of the documental heritage of a nation
clearly demonstrates the fragility of the materials chosen for the
conservation of the human memory throughout time, and the instability of
elements of such an importance for peoples’ identity. The history of any
society, its best intellectual products, its glories and failures, its heroes and
villains, its greatest discoveries, everything is currently kept on the shelves
of libraries and archives. The power of this cultural heritage surpasses the
highest standards. It is the most valuable treasure owned by humankind: it
includes its memories, its desires and the solutions for those problems arisen
along the path walked by the previous generations through the past
centuries.
All this power, all this valuable experience, is placed right now in the hands
of librarians.
Librarianship cannot be understood as a simple technical profession
anymore. At present, librarians are memory managers; their active role at
war times, being aware of the existence of serious disagreements, hatred,
violence and many different conflicts (political, ethnic, etc.) is fundamental
and strategic for the future preservation of any people’s cultural heritage.
Upon the decisions and actions of librarians depends identity survival: they
have the key to allow children and young people be able to know their roots,
their past, the place they come from and the dreams they should pursue and
accordingly guide their steps to make them true.
Librarians are not expected to face the violence, bombings, injustices and
summary executions featuring war and vandal acts in a direct way. Nor are
they to risk their lives and self-security in order to defend and protect the
heritage they manage. To ask for such a thing would be unrealistic. However,
if they are conscious of their role in the conservation of their community’s
memory, they should take preventive actions and implement new policies in
order to secure their collections in case of disaster and avoid a possible loss
of them. The responsibility assumed for possessing power must be
considered at the same level, realizing of its magnitude, the same as the
power itself. A great power – the one associated with information – involves a
great responsibility – the one of protecting information in order to assure
everybody of the possibility of its present and future use.
Perhaps one of the most precautionary measures to achieve the aim of
safeguarding from loss or damage any heritage is its reproduction in safe
copies and its widespread diffusion. By allowing the biggest bibliographic
treasures to spread over a wide area, copying their information in a different
way, duplicating them and assuring their open and free access, librarians
could guarantee that their community will continue being the owner of their
memory. In this way, violence still could damage a valuable masterpiece or a
historic document, but such violence will neither be able to kill ideas nor to
destroy the knowledge collected as it has been done until now. The
community, the people, will own its memory forever.
In order to achieve this goal, librarians should put aside the idea that the
library is a museum, a closed place consisting of several shelves in a line,
and four walls jealously protecting the books placed on them, from any kind
of external contact. The library must be kept alive and should have the
opportunity to breathe like a living creature, to grow, expanded and become
greater not only in size or number but in importance within the society which
gives sense to its existence. Librarians must (re)produce knowledge and
spread it, they must help their users to be conscious of the high value of the
knowledge they handle, share and enjoy, teaching them to be responsible
and to protect their own history and their own culture, in many cases
collected in books and documents. Just by changing libraries’ policies and
librarians’ attitudes, trying to set those repositories free from their bonds and
succeeding in joining them to their community, the knowledge accumulated
inside their walls will belong to everybody. Only then, we will be certain that
there will not be any chance to eliminate our cultural heritage, not even by
making use of the most terrible acts of violence.

Umberto Eco (2003) spoke at the newly opened Bibliotheca Alexandrina
in Cairo, Egypt and said:
“Libraries, over the centuries, have been the most important way of
keeping our collective wisdom. They were and still are a sort of universal
brain where we can retrieve what we have forgotten and what we still do not
know. If you will allow me to use such a metaphor, a library is the best
possible imitation, by human beings, of a divine mind, where the whole
universe is viewed and understood at the same time. A person able to store
in his or her mind the information provided by a great library would emulate
in some way the mind of God. In other words, we have invented libraries
because we try to do our best to imitate them (p.1).”

The worst enemy of Libraries is the fanaticism of either or both of the
warring parties, especially if one of the goals of the conflict is to rid a country
of objectionable religious or cultural material or thinking. Another is a lack of
vision of individuals or a government. Added to this is the general feeling
that Libraries are not a high priority in times of war, despite the 1954
UNESCO convention for the protection of cultural property. The final blow to
Libraries occurs during “The fog of war” when niceties are put aside and all
hell breaks loose.

Human rights information is like other forms of information in that it
must be well organized, cataloged, and managed if it is to benefit the
greatest number of persons. But whereas human rights information might,
in some regards, necessitate the same maintenance and organizational
treatment as other forms of information, one must not fail to recognize that
human rights information differs from other genres of information for the
simple fact that it is much more critical. Human rights information — in
specific contexts and during crucial moments — holds the potential to save
lives, prevent murder, stop state-sponsored terrorism, and generally further
the cause of human rights. It is for this reason that librarians and other
information workers — as experts in information organization, delivery, and
promotion — should be front and center in the fight for distribution of
sousveillance media, for the dissemination of information from the poor to
the rich, and for advancing mechanisms and technologies that promote
freedom of expression in political environments that favor censorship. It is
because of the very importance of human rights information that information
workers should not wait until funds have been established, a vision has been
crafted, and a proper job description constructed before putting their skills to
use. To be sure, the efforts of information scientists and librarians are sorely
needed in the struggle for human rights and the time to act is now.

Information for Social Change Issue 25

Proses Pemantauan

Proses pemantauan yang dimaksud disini adalah pemantauan dalam kaitan pelanggaran hak asasi manusia:

Tahap Pemantauan:

1. Menentukan fokus
2. Investigasi
3. Dokumentasi dan Analisis
4. Pelaporan: -tentukan-target diseminasi informasi

selengkapnya:
Proses Pemantauan