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Esther Jones
Journal Review & Analysis Essay
Analysis of the Revista Interamericana de Bibliotecología
Word Count: 1745
“El libro más antiguo de todos es la tierra, donde están escritos los movimientos del tiempo y
del viento, el canto de los árboles, los decires de las estrellas y del agua; donde están escritos
los caminos de la lluvia y de las semillas, las voces de los pájaros y de los pueblos, las montañas
indomables y las tierras cultivadas. Leer la tierra, caminarla, recorrerla y conocerla es la mejor
manera de amarla y de aprender a respetarla.”
"The oldest book of them all is the Earth. Where the movements of time and the wind lie written,
the song of the trees, and the tales of the stars and the water. Where the course of the rain and
the seeds lies written, the voices of the birds and the peoples, the untamed mountains and the
cultivated land. Reading the Earth, wandering over it, passing across it and knowing: that is the
best way to love it and to learn to respect it."
~Alfredo Mires, Executive Advisor to the Cajamarca Rural Libraries Network (Giarolo 2013).
Since the Inca peoples of the mountainous Cajamarca region of Perú met the conquering
Spaniards, Duque (2017) documented, their exposure to the written word has almost always been
intertwined with colonization. As Mires (2017) puts it, the written word was subjugation's
emissary: the "humble explorers" massacred thousands of Cajamarcans on the very same day
they introduced the Bible.
This is just one of many stories and studies explored in the annals of the Revista
Interamericana de Bibliotecología (The Interamerican Library Science Review). In the next few
pages, I will be exploring ...erm...sharing what I have learned from the information professionals
of the American South. I will start with an overview of the journal and the school that sponsors
it; delve into decolonization and archives as collective memory; highlight the role of the
information professional in the digital age as a future trend of importance; and conclude with a
general overview of why this publication's contributions to the field are so important.

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To begin with, the journal is affiliated with the Escuela Interamericana de Bibliotecología
(Interamerican School of Library Science), a school at the University of Antioquia in Medellín,
Colombia. The school was founded in 1956, and according to Morales-Campos (2017), "its name
intended to outline its destiny and objectives: A university entity […] with Latin American
vocation, training professional cadres for the libraries of the region, with aspirations of
modernity and a quality curriculum that would include the current trends of world librarianship."
Their first cadre included thirty-five students from six countries: Chile, Honduras, Costa Rica,
Haiti, Ecuador, and Colombia, of course (Morales-Campos 2017). Twenty-two years later, the
journal was started, almost as a coming-of-age accomplishment or rite of passage. The school
wanted to shine a light on how it was contributing to the field, as well as increase its visibility
and reputation via the scholarly journal published thrice yearly (Morales-Campos 2017). The
journal seems to be aimed at library and information science professionals in the Spanish
speaking world with an emphasis on South America. Articles from the three issues that came out
in 2016 were downloaded more than 17,000 times as of August 2017, according to Vallejo &
Betancur (2017).
There are traces of the past five centuries of Latin America’s conquest, trauma, and
resistance woven throughout the journal. Though the region is comprised of many distinct
countries with separate cultures, they are united through this collective experience. Just like the
history of the United States and the perspective through which one learns it shapes the way they
view the world, the history of Latin American has a similar effect. From this worldview, the
2017 issues of the journal focused on decolonization efforts & theory and archives as a tool of
memory and identity.

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Nowadays in Cajamarca, the site of the massacre mentioned earlier, the cycle continues.
The descendants of the Incans toil on land that produces a large percentage of Peru's food supply
and work in the country's most prosperous mines, but they live in conditions of extreme poverty
without electricity or plumbing (Duque 2017). As Safiya Noble’s (2016) work on oppression and
discrimination in the field of technology highlights, this is the level that inequality begins on.
Thanks to grassroots movements in the 1970s, however, Cajamarca is now fighting the tentacles
of colonization by reclaiming and redefining literacy through a rural network of around 500
libraries run by community elders who volunteer their time and their homes to store and
transport the network's collection, which includes an impressive number of self-published books
(Duque 2017). These books are written compilations of oral histories, skills, and stories passed
down for generation, and are in high demand in their communities (Duque 2017).
Issue 1 of the journal tells this story two ways: as a paper submitted to the journal, and as
the transcript of a lecture given at a conference in Medellin. Both articles mourned the fact that
traditional knowledge was not lauded as important. Mires (2017) lamented that the written word
entered his country as a sort of cultural guillotine, but insists that reading does not have to mute
the natural world, as evidenced in his convictions in the quote at the beginning of this paper.
Duque (2017) explained that the library system can be considered affirmative action since the
network contributes to the lessening of inequalities in communities, giving them access to oral
and written culture, which traditional libraries don’t do, since those libraries think for the
communities, not with them. Since 1971, the library network, or “red” in Spanish, has worked
with the book as a medium of reinforcing the people’s capacity for discernment, affirming the
culture, and to strengthen the dignity of the people (Duque 2017). Whether or not these libraries
knew about Paulo Freire (1998) and his work on popular education, they are a living success

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story of his liberating ideas: “Speaking the word is not a true act if it is not at the same time
associated with the right of self-expression and world-expression, of creating and re-creating, of
deciding and choosing and ultimately participating in society's historical process” (p. 7). The
people of Cajamarca are now very proactive actors in their communities’ decolonizing education
process, thanks to their ingenuity and collaboration.
Human rights archives are a pet interest of mine, so I was very pleasantly surprised to see
how much literature on the subject exists in Spanish! The bibliography of Giraldo Lopera’s
(2017) Archives, Human Rights, and Collective Memory international literature review had over
80 cited sources and I had to mop up my drool. Oh, to be able to cite scholarly works from at
least 3 different languages in my papers someday! As Connaway & Faniel (2014) re-ordered
Ranganathan’s five laws, they argued that libraries and librarians should know their community
and its needs. I argue that that can be translated to archives as well. I believe that communities
have a right to know their history, stories, traditions, and to be familiar with their culture. Where
that right has been controlled, belittled, or taken away, I think archives have a responsibility to
help restore that sense of community identity. Lots of research has been done on this subject, and
I’m overwhelmed at the amount of it that exists in Spanish that I haven’t even read yet. Giraldo-
Lopera did her homework!
The school at the University of Antioquia has a robust archival studies program, and that
was shown in the journal. At least one article in each issue covered the topic. In the spring issue,
it was a qualitative study on Colombian photos as collective memory and cultural heritage. The
international human rights archival literature review appeared in the summer issue along with an
article arguing that marketing photo archives by evoking nostalgia was an effective strategy to
get the word out. The articles in the winter issue explained the process of information

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dissemination in a photo archive and debated different views on document assessment processes.
Given Latin America’s collective history and what I discussed above, I’m starting to understand
why there are so many human rights archives and photo archives scattered across the continent.
While decolonizing and archival processes deal with documenting and transforming the
things of the past, the librarians in the Interamerican Review of Library Science are also focused
on documenting and transforming the things of the future. Many articles among the three issues
stressed the need for re-examining the role of the information professional considering today’s
rapidly changing technology. The spring issue evaluated the Dewey Decimal System’s ability to
classify digital items, examined the relevance of Europeana’s digital resources, and interviewed a
professor about how information science professionals should serve in digital scenarios.
Summer’s issue examined digital video’s effectiveness when used in online journals. The
visibility of Latin American researchers on digital research databases and challenges for the
librarian of today were presented in the 2017 winter issue.
What does this tell me? Latin American librarians and archivists are proactively engaged
in promoting continued relevancy and competence in today’s globalized & digital world. It took
me about five times longer than it usually does to read just one of the scholarly articles in this
journal. I can only imagine how long it takes someone whose first language is not English to read
something from a journal in the United States, given our maddening love for thesauri and
synonyms. I’m undergoing a similar mental toll to the one I experienced two weeks into my
study abroad program: my brain is so overwhelmed! This was a good push for this cranium of
mine that reads comfortably at a young adult level. It saddens me that these papers aren’t
available in English, but that makes me mad that more English papers aren’t available in other
languages. How can we expect to atone for our legacy of colonization or increase diversity in the

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workforce if the message that “only neurotypical able-bodied straight white heterosexual cis-
gendered men & citizens can control and benefit from information” is continually sent out
implicitly and explicitly in much of what we do as information professionals?
The passion that the editors of this journal showed is clear regarding the promotion of
decolonizing and archival work, and paving the way for Latin American information
professionals to be digital trailblazers. I look forward to the direction that this journal with go in,
and now I have one more reason to visit Colombia someday.

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Works Cited
Connaway, Lynn Silipigni, and Ixchel M. Faniel. (2014). Reordering Ranganathan: Shifting
User Behaviors, Shifting Priorities. Dublin, OH: OCLC Research.
Duque, N. (2017). La Red de Bibliotecas Rurales de Cajamarca: ¿una acción afirmativa? Revista
Interamericana de Bibliotecología, 40(1), 13-26. doi: 10.17533/udea.rib.v40n1a02
Freire, Paulo. (1998 Winter). Cultural Action for Freedom part I: The Adult Literacy Process as
Cultural Action for Freedom. Harvard Educational Review 68, 1-21.
Giarolo, P.P. (2013). Clouds & Books [Motion picture]. Italy/France: (Available from
www.caravellafilm.com).
Giraldo-Lopera, M. (2017). Archivos, derechos humanos y memoria colectiva. Una revisión de
la literatura académica internacional. Revista Interamericana de Bibliotecología, 40(2),
125-144. doi: 10.17533/udea.rib.v40n2a02
Mires, A. (2017). La tierra cuenta. Oralidad, lectura y escritura en territorio comunitario.
Conferencia llevada a cabo en el congreso Lectura, escritura y oralidad, Casa de Lectura
Infantil, Medellín, 28 de noviembre del 2016. Revista Interamericana de Bibliotecología,
40(1), 95-103. doi: 10.17533/udea.rib.v40n1a09
Morales-Campos, E. (2017). La Escuela Interamericana de Bibliotecología y su influencia en
América Latina. Revista Interamericana de Bibliotecología, 40(2), 189-200. doi:
10.17533/udea.rib.v40n2a07
Noble, Safiya. (2016). A Future for Intersectional Black Feminist Technology Studies. The
Scholar & Feminist Online, 13.3-14.1, 1-8.

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Vallejo Echavarría, J., & Betancur Marín, A. (2017). Información estadística vol. 40 y métricas
vol. 39, de la RIB. Revista Interamericana de Bibliotecología, 40(3), 337-343.
doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.17533/udea.rib.v40n3a11