This content is archived.
City of Québec, Sunday, August 10, 2008
We have come together where the majestic St. Lawrence River narrows, which is the original Indian meaning of the word Quebec.
Welcome to the City of Québec!
In this magnificent city steeped in history, in this year marking the 400th anniversary of its founding by French explorer Samuel de Champlain and his fellow adventurers.
This anniversary reminds us of the great epic of those first crossings, those “new beginnings” in America, to quote Père le Jeune.
Champlain recounted and illustrated this epic in great detail in four successive works published between 1603 and 1632, travel logs covering almost all of his travels in the Americas and his time in Canada.
Almost all accounts of his explorations and discoveries have survived to this day because they were published in his lifetime and preserved in libraries and archives.
It was also on the initiative of a librarian—Abbé Laverdière, who was also a history teacher at the Séminaire de Québec—that these texts were reedited two centuries later.
This was followed by an abundance of studies and works.
There is no doubt that, were it not for the publication and preservation of Champlain’s travel logs and all of the works dedicated to them, this decisive page of our history that we are celebrating this year would have been lost.
During your stay here, I encourage you to visit the Citadelle of Québec, recognized as the oldest preserved military site in North America and home to the Governor General’s official residence. It also contains an important heritage building, the Redoubt, built by the Sieur de Frontenac in 1693, and restored to exhibit Le Grand Livre de Champlain, a major work of art donated by the French cites of La Rochelle, Rochefort and the Agglomération de Royan for the City of Québec’s 400th anniversary.
Because like you, I believe that any space dedicated to sharing humanity’s great adventure and knowledge enlightens and enriches our collective heritage.
That is why you, as guardians of the world’s memories, have always played an essential role in human development: from the clay tablets preserved in the library and archives of the palaces of Assyrian kings, to the mythical Library at Alexandria, all the way to the digital age.
Throughout history, we have needed the insight and commitment of people, like you, who recognize the importance and scope of written works and accounts, which have allowed words to survive the centuries, cross borders, break down solitudes and speak to us.
These passers-on of knowledge, these guardians of manuscripts, these transcribers, these illuminators, these founders of libraries and archives, these wise spirits; they are the reason we have access to the wisdom of Aristotle and the plays of Sophocles and Euripides thousands of years after they died, the reason we can listen to the scores of musical geniuses like Mozart.
Libraries and the sciences behind them were born of a longing for perpetuity and universality that every great civilization has entertained since the invention of writing: the desire to bring all the world’s knowledge together in the manner of Jorge Luis Borges, who one day dreamed of a library that would contain every work written since the beginning of time.
History has taught us that those who want to stifle ideas and freedom often focus on libraries and books, banning them and burning them at the stake of their barbarism. So many fragile and precious treasures have been reduced to ashes. Two million books, including 3000 priceless manuscripts, went up in smoke the night of August 25–26, 1992, when Sarajevo’s library was deliberately bombed and burned to the ground. It was as though two million stars in the sky of humanity were forever extinguished.
Which only goes to show that preserving knowledge and making it accessible to all—thereby encouraging the sharing and meeting of ideas, critical thought, humanism and all the strength of the forces of creation—this ideal can never be completely protected from the narrow-minded or the forces of destruction.
We must therefore be vigilant and protect this ideal, work on it constantly and democratize it like a common good, commodity, or resource that is essential to life.
And, I must say, this ideal has never seemed as attainable or feasible as it does today, at a time when new technologies provide libraries, archives and heritage institutions almost infinite possibilities.
The very nature of documents has changed, as have the ways they are created, distributed and preserved. Documents now go above-and-beyond the written word and include sound recordings, videos and films. We have now entered the era of the multimedia library.
New media allow what seemed unimaginable only twenty-five years ago.
We can now ensure that written works, the traits of civilizations and accounts given through oral traditions all live on in perpetuity. With these new media, we can save entire lifestyles from disappearing into the shadows.
Here in Canada, we know how important it is to protect ancestral cultures, especially those of the first people, who are our deepest roots on this continent, the First Nations, Inuit and Métis.
There is an urgent need to do all we can to protect the wealth of their legends, their stories, their customs, their knowledge and their ties to the land.
It is essential that we help them gather the traces of everything that colonization took from them and ensure this unique heritage is preserved. Too many languages have already disappeared simply through indifference.
What better defence against the ravages of indifference than knowledge? Was that not what Diderot was aiming for with his ambitious Encyclopédie project during the Enlightenment?
As librarians and archivists, you already know how to make certain that knowledge travels well beyond the walls of your institutions. Digitization and the Web have finally removed the constraints of space and access. You now have powerful instruments of development and democratization at your disposal.
With libraries now being posted on the Web, new networks can be created, and unexpected and brilliant ties can be established between various fields of knowledge and a wide range of disciplines.
Information institutions, libraries and related establishments are being brought together on a global scale, resulting in an unprecedented access to knowledge.
In this way, you are not only guarding memories and transmitting knowledge; you are also supplying content and meaning.
One might even say that, without you, new technologies would be but empty shells.
I strongly believe that libraries—both traditional and virtual, because I think they both have their place—must now more than ever be part of the movement toward openness and an even-greater access to the diversity of cultures, sources and knowledge.
Libraries, big and small, must also guide us in our quest for meaning and our understanding of our place in history and the world.
In Haiti, where I was born, what is of greatest concern to people is the food shortage, the cost of living, the lack of security, the bankruptcy of institutions, and access to education.
The thirst for knowledge and the desire to learn pushes young people who have no electricity at home to stand together at night under streetlamps, where there are any, or to strain their eyes under oil lamps to work on their lessons and read anything they can get their hands on.
Tell them about libraries that are open to everyone, incredible places of discovery, and watch them start to dream big.
Alberto Manguel, an Argentinean-born Canadian novelist, essayist, translator, eminent polyglot, collector of books, and voracious and generous reader—he read to a blind Borges for two years—described his hours of reverie in libraries in this way: “I feel an adventurous pleasure in losing myself among the crowded stacks, superstitiously confident that any established hierarchy of letters or numbers will lead me one day to a promised destination.”
I think that the promised destination Manguel spoke of is that vital space where anything is possible, where all of our hopes and dreams reside.
I will never forget the first time my mother put a book in my hands.
That first book opened my eyes, my soul and my heart to the world as we know it, and the world as we can imagine it.
As a result, I gained not only knowledge, but a freedom that can never be taken from me, one that inspires me in all of the battles I face, today as yesterday, through my desire to do all that I can to help humanize humanity.
Yesterday, among other things, I did so by supporting the library in the disadvantaged neighbourhood where I lived for more than 15 years in southwest Montreal, and by helping to restock the library in the little elementary school attended by many children whose homes did not contain a single book or magazine.
Today, the governor general who stands before you supports the implementation of reading camps for children and libraries, even in isolated communities, some of which are among the most disadvantaged in our country.
During my many travels across Canada and State visits to developing countries, I always take boxes of books with me to distribute, including many that have won the Governor General’s Literary Award, especially those from the Children’s Literature category.
I was excited to see that one of the invited speakers at this congress is the former lieutenant-governor of Ontario, my friend James Bartleman, who, with great conviction and imagination, helped establish a vast network dedicated to reading, educational libraries and literacy training in Aboriginal communities in northern Ontario. Our dream is to make it a national initiative.
Every word, every action, every book, every library, every multimedia library counts.
I salute your commitment and dedication to a cause that is dear to my heart, and I hope you have very productive discussions in this city, which is more beautiful than ever this year and in the mood to celebrate.
Thank you, and may you enjoy a most successful congress!