Christian Schmidt
Libraries are under attack. Book bans in North America, political intimidation in Germany – these are documented authoritarian threats. But only focusing on these external dangers overlooks the ones from within.
Tax-funded libraries – public and academic – are ideal Trojan horses. Jacques Derrida noted that controlling the archive means controlling public memory – and thus the future. Today’s democratic infrastructure becomes tomorrow’s authoritarian tool if right-wing parties gain power. Donald Trump’s United States proves it in real time: replacing independent librarians and archivists with loyalists, erasing inconvenient historical facts from the official record in plain sight.
One self-inflicted threat to the integrity of memory institutions, however, is often overlooked, despite neither being new nor a secret. With their budgets libraries around the world feed a surveillance apparatus maintained by the likes of Elsevier, LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters. These data cartels collect millions from libraries for database and journal access, then channel the revenue into profiling software sold to authorities globally, which – like US immigration authority ICE – use it for unlawful detentions.
Such complicity of libraries with authoritarian regimes is indirect, but voluntary. Neither our professional ethics nor United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, endorsed by libraries for their ethical stance, prevent us from participating in this practice. Our license fees cross borders, but so does our responsibility.
If libraries want to remain drivers of democracy, we must act: cut all ties with big data cartels, reclaim technical sovereignty, champion open knowledge. Above all, we must rethink our role. The archival profession points the way – from centralized custody toward supporting community-based preservation. Instead of gatekeeping information, libraries should empower the public as ‘citizen librarians’, facilitating knowledge work beyond institutional control.
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