By Mikael Böök, Isnäs, Finland
Part 1 of this blog post gathered many international readers three days ago, not least thanks to Kathleen de la Peña McCook and her sharing and comments.
Evidently, the librarians’ resistance to discuss this matter is considerable, even among peers in the Facebook (which is not really in the public sphere, and not really private either).
To overcome this inhibition, it is probably wise to divide the matter in two by drawing a line between the person and the thing (admittedly, this is often quite difficult).
Therefore, please consider that Julian Assange is a man and that a man is strictly speaking not a thing, whereas the WikiLeaks is a thing, I mean a certain collection of documents that WikiLeaks has released and made public on its website WikiLeaks.org and/or via their co-publishers; newspapers or other public media.
Also, ponder that documents can be mismanaged, locked up in a secret place, or simply destroyed, but not mistreated and tortured (in the same sense as a living being can be).
Then ask yourself and your peers, the other librarians: what will happen with the huge document library that now exists and can be studied at WikiLeaks.org? For how long do we think that a website, such as WikiLeaks.org, will stay alive? Where will all those documents be preserved if, one day, …
