As a good habit, I write a blog before starting my summer holidays. Last year was all about working as Director General of the KB | National Library of The Netherlands, so it would make sense for me to reflect on that. And I do so in part. Partly, because a short piece on the concept of identity does not sum up everything I have experienced this year, let me be clear about that. Nor does it intend to. The word comes up as I review my notes from some of the conferences I have been at in recent weeks, ranging from the National Library Congress 2025 (in Dutch) in Utrecht, to CENL in Edinburgh, Scotland and LIBER in Lausanne, Switzerland. Let me give it a go, but I also honestly admit that it hasn’t quite crystallised yet, my thought process.

It is not enough to survive

I quite like to provoke a bit sometimes. And so recently, I repeated a quote from Bridget Jones’ father (on his deathbed) a few times. I saw the fourth film in the series with two colleagues when we arrived in Edinburgh and this film was being shown outside; it was a sort of coincide we bumped into it. ‘It is not enough to survive, you have to live’. For perhaps this statement is true for the daughter to whom it spoke, but also for organisations like ours. To which I freely translate that to the need to keep up with developments around us, and not let things just happen to you. Another link from Edinburgh, but this time from Richard Ovenden, who was a speaker at the conference. I came across this speech online, where he gives five reasons why libraries and archives are of great importance to society, this being the last : ‘Finally, they are places where the identities of individuals, communities, and society are preserved and celebrated, whether through local history in our villages, towns and counties, or through celebrating the cultures of diaspora communities who have come to enrich the lives of our nation.’ Read this speech anyway! And I also liked the first speaker of the plenary session at LIBER, Frederic Kaplan. He concluded his talk with ‘a vision of a “library-powered future,” where institutions preserving patrimonial knowledge play a central role in shaping the next generation of language models, suggesting a more balanced distribution of power between AI infrastructure and heritage institutions.’

DNA of knowledge

In the conversations I had with them afterwards (separately), we came up with the ‘DNA of knowledge’, where you can retrieve or demonstrate, as it were, how your own knowledge (whether instantaneously accumulated as external memory, or long-standing) came about. Or how well we as libraries can (should) foster curiosity. To ensure that everyone continues to really think for themselves and that we continue to encourage and nurture that. I also talked about that briefly (in Lausanne) with CENL’s host, Amina Shah. How I think open access and making scientific articles ‘accessible to the public’ is not necessarily about the ability to read and understand or interpret the articles themselves, but rather that by facilitating this, we make knowledge accessible and give at least the possibility to be able to do so. Our response to what is happening (e.g. around intellectual property and copyright) should not be to put up a wall (again) around knowledge, but to make or keep it accessible, in the right way. And public libraries in particular, alongside university libraries, can play an important role in this towards the general public.

Preserving your identity

Finally, this brings me to the realisation that it is not only about accountability (as I mentioned earlier in my blog No Twist in Our Sovereignty’, the library as an ‘accountable’ space), or, in that same blog, the importance of preserving public ownership, but also about (helping) to preserve one’s own, the local and the (sometimes inter-) national identity. Artificial Intelligence was of course a strong topic of conversation at these conferences, and the feeling that we are slowly moving away from our own identity, and subordinating it to collective identity, prevails. And this is where we can, have, and must play a role as libraries.

Tilda Swinton_zelf aangepast

Tilda Swinton by John Byrne at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Talking about identity. As Byrne put it: “… In other words, I was out to capture her essence”.

What does it mean?

Another question, which I have been asking myself quite often lately, is ‘what does it mean?’. That is, it is not enough to set a mission, vision or goals if you don’t understand what it means or is going to mean. Not that you can fully predict this, but you have to have a picture of it, and then be prepared to bear the consequences. I am incredibly looking forward to working with all the smart and wise people inside and outside our organisation in the coming period to give meaning to the importance of libraries. To ensure the preservation of public ownership as well as the different identities through which you become who you want to be, whether as an individual or as another ‘entity’. Where both difference and equity matter. And not just to be ‘surviving’, but actually to be ‘living’.

I hope this is not too vague and cryptic. It has come about from my own thought process. It really did.