From the Director of Libraries Without Borders (http://www.librarieswithoutborders.org)
Dear all,
Here is a brief point on the situation in Haïti.
We have a contact with Patrick Tardieu who is an archivist in the oldest library in Port au Prince, Bibliothèque des Pères du Saint Esprit. Fortunately, he’s alive and flighted yesterday to Canada. The first information we have are:
- Saint Martial College in which there is the Bibliothèque Haïtienne des pères du saint esprit collapsed
- The St Louis de Gonzague library building would be ok but very weakened
- The national Library collapsed, at least a part of it
- Most of the university libraries collapsed too
Those libraries gathered very old collections (from the 16th centuries). Several manuscripts were brought by the missionaries who came from Europe. Other have been collected in the Caraibs (notably, publications on the haitian revolutions, transcriptions of vaudou oral traditions, personal documents from the 18th centuries).
We think it’s urgent to run an international campaign for saving these collections, at least in France, the US and Canada. We have to create a dedicated funds to launch the campaign and raise money. In our side, we are already in contact with the French IFLA comittee (International Federation of Library Association), the Foreign Affairs (through its agency CulturesFrance) and the culture ministry. In the US we will work with professor Laurent Dubois, Duke University, who has a good knowledge of these collections and is ready to rally the archivists and the historians community. Patrick Tardieu, who is in Canada now will help us too, to have a better knowledge of the situation.
We have to prepare, for next week to :
1. Open a dedicated fundraising paypal account at least in the US and France for the operation (not only focused on the emergency of saving these collections but also on the effort of rebuilding in the next monthes)
2. Work with organizations such as IFLA, UNESCO and the FOKAL Foundation (its director, Elizabeth Pierre Louis, who we well know is still missing for the moment) in order to avoid the redundancies.
3. Prepare to form a team of curator, archivists, historians and logistics coordinators who would be ready to go there in the next weeks or months.
For the moment we have good contacts in Guadeloupe. We might need to find places in Canada and in the US. People are mobilizing there and could prepare rapidly to host the collections for a while. Patrick Tardieu told me that we maybe could host them in other places in haiti if the roads are ok. We’ll check up on this point next week. Our principal ennemy will be the rain from now. The collections could be destroyed forever. Most of these pieces are unique.
We’ll have more info hopefully next week on the collections and the situation there. Don’t hesitate to share the news you’d have.
Thank you for your mobilization. I’ll be reachable during the week end on my cell phone : +33.6.82.99.36.84. BSF sent a first communiqué today in memory of Mamadou Bah, a good friend of us, who worked at the UN in Port au Prince. You’ll find it at this adress: http://mim.io/15f12?fe=1
We have no news from Nixon Calixte who was coordinating the University Libraries net work in Haiti Best
Jérémy Lachal
Directeur – BSF
jeremy.lachal@bibliosansfrontieres.org
+33.(0)6.58.43.85.56 – +33.(0)1.43.25.75.61
Bibliothèques Sans Frontières
69 rue Armand Carrel, 75019 Paris
http://www.bibliosansfrontieres.org
