The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - Richard Ovenden, OBE - Author of ＂Burning the Books＂ & Bodley's Librarian (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1016)

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00:01:05.720 Hi everybody, this is Gatsad. Today I've got another fantastic guest. I've got Richard

00:01:11.200 Ovenden. I had to prepare this a priori because there's a lot of pronunciation pitfalls here.

00:01:17.960 you are the director of the bodleian libraries at the university of oxford and a fellow at

00:01:23.820 baliol college i'm sure i got that wrong you were awarded an obe order of the british empire and

00:01:30.940 you still currently serve as the president of the digital preservation coalition is that still

00:01:35.340 yep yep that's all correct yeah well first welcome how are you doing i'm doing well thank you i'm

00:01:41.920 very excited to speak to you now the the way that i found out of your work is i was speaking to

00:01:47.560 the person at Harvard University Press, and she was kind enough to send me a whole bunch

00:01:54.800 of complimentary books. And I chose yours as one of the ones on my list, which was

00:02:00.500 This Beauty, which I read about maybe six months ago, Burning the Books, A History of the Deliberate

00:02:06.600 Destruction of Knowledge. Maybe we could start there and then we can go from there and see how

00:02:12.480 goes tell us a bit about okay okay so um the book is is really about the social importance of

00:02:21.440 preserving knowledge and it's i i approach that topic through the lens of what happens when we

00:02:28.940 lose it and what are the motivations for um the deliberate losing of knowledge not the accidental

00:02:36.740 not not fires that break out by accident that burn a library down but where people set out

00:02:43.400 to destroy erase remove knowledge from a community of society um and to look at that through a long

00:02:53.860 historical lens i'm a historian by background um and so i can't stop myself from going back into

00:03:00.900 those um into those accounts and um and then i try to bring it up to the present day you know

00:03:07.920 what is happening today both in terms of public policy around the world in terms of legislation

00:03:14.700 but also the trends in things like technology and um you know how are decisions that are made by

00:03:23.440 governments or um you know the the tech companies what my colleague in oxford timothy garton ash

00:03:31.100 calls the private superpowers the big tech companies you know how are these changing the

00:03:36.800 regimes of knowledge um today so it's a kind of you know there's a long i think quite interesting

00:03:43.540 set of case studies that i lay out in the book um you know from the ancient civilizations of

00:03:49.800 mesopotamia and then trying to bring it you know very much bang up to date or at least as it was

00:03:55.720 in 2020 when the book was published um and i've been writing since in um you know mostly in

00:04:03.440 newspapers and magazines as as you know the book had some degree of impact when it was first

00:04:09.080 published and then editors think oh i know i'm gonna i'm i'm become the go-to guy for kind of

00:04:15.360 book burning um so i've written about ukraine in the atlantic and about afghanistan in the ft weekend

00:04:23.100 and um and in it in other places as well some of the historical stories uh in the book is is really

00:04:31.280 what captivated me the narrative behind those stories i think you cover well over 2 000 years

00:04:36.640 would that be correct in saying i think more like 3 000 or 3 000 is there a common thread

00:04:43.640 for the reasons why the burning of the libraries and the books happens throughout history?

00:04:50.480 And I ask this perhaps from the reflex of being an evolutionary psychologist.

00:04:55.560 There is a permanence to human nature that even though we might have different cultural

00:05:02.280 traditions, there is a bedrock of shared biological heritage that we all share.

00:05:08.700 So can we apply that lens of sort of the human universal?

00:05:12.160 I mean, I think so. And I think it really boils down to a quote that is kind of buried somewhere in the book by Derrida, which is there is no political power without power over the archive, which he wrote in his famous book, Archive Fever.

00:05:30.900 and uh i i think it's about control if you can control knowledge you can control a narrative

00:05:39.420 you can control um what people think of the past and you can control to some extent how they will

00:05:47.680 behave in the future because people look to the past for information for ideas for inspiration

00:05:54.340 um and it's that controlling aspects and the motivations for why people feel the need to

00:06:02.960 control there are political reasons there are sometimes religious reasons there are cultural

00:06:08.140 reasons you know there's a whole that becomes more complex more interesting but it's really

00:06:14.300 about control and um we see this right up to you know today with ai which of course needs

00:06:23.260 knowledge to feed the large language models which then feed the outputs of generative ai

00:06:28.720 and where um decisions about what kinds of data go into feed those are a kind of extension it's

00:06:37.680 not the same as the destruction of knowledge it's not the same as book burning but it's

00:06:41.820 it's that same actually what do we want uh what how do we want to exert control over the domain

00:06:49.900 of knowledge in in this in this book my also my 2020 book your book is from 2020 this is the

00:06:56.880 parasitic mind uh i talk about because i'm discussing forbidden knowledge which is a

00:07:02.780 topic that i pick up again in my most recent book and i tell the story from uh neighbor the rose 0.94

00:07:09.060 i don't know if you you remember that i love that book absolutely yeah well i i i was idiotic enough

00:07:15.720 to actually not read the book, but watch the movie,

00:07:18.300 although I don't think I was disappointed

00:07:19.760 in only watching the movie.

00:07:21.560 But maybe you know where I'm already going with this.

00:07:24.800 And spoiler alert for anybody who wants to either read the book

00:07:28.120 or watch the movie, I'm about to spoil it for you.

00:07:30.840 So there is a set of mysterious murders or deaths

00:07:35.920 that are happening in this monastery,

00:07:39.160 I think around the 12th or 13th century.

00:07:41.460 And a gentleman is brought in, I think maybe a Benedictine monk

00:07:44.560 who is played by Sean Connery, who's brought in to try to resolve this mystery, played by Sean

00:07:52.540 Connery, and all of these monks are dying because there's sort of this blue dye on their tongues,

00:07:59.200 and then he finds out, and it's going to resonate well with what we're talking about here, that the

00:08:04.820 head monk of the monastery thought that there's this forbidden library, that all the monks should

00:08:11.880 not be consuming that knowledge i think it was about from aristotle's you know book on comedy

00:08:18.640 and so on that's the work of the devil and so on and so what he did is he laced the the pages here

00:08:24.760 where you turn with poison so that if you do actually get into the forbidden library you

00:08:30.620 would be killed so that reflex of saying i am the overlord who would decide what you can read or not

00:08:36.400 existed certainly a thousand years ago right yeah it's a yeah it's about gatekeeping knowledge

00:08:43.420 it's about um and i think the kind of ultimate expression of that is actually to burn a library

00:08:48.820 down to destroy um and in the case of the holocaust you know to to attempt to you know

00:08:54.960 essentially destroy or control an entire culture's memory right and uh you know so you know there 0.83

00:09:03.160 have been these moments in history where it's been you know extreme um and that you know a

00:09:10.560 cultural genocide a knowledge genocide has pre-emptied a human genocide now in your case

00:09:17.580 obviously as a historian you're looking at this 3 000 year period where people willfully try to

00:09:23.980 destroy knowledge for a variety of reasons as you said political religious and so on

00:09:28.420 Now, forbidden knowledge, in the way that I use the term, well, as it's used in academia, is forward-looking in that we decide, the overlords, what is the type of research that, if you were to conduct that research, it might result in the hurt feelings of a marginalized group or something.

00:09:50.680 Therefore, we are using a consequentialist ethic rather than a deontological ethic.

00:09:55.640 A deontological ethic would be freedom of inquiry has no bounds.

00:09:59.520 It's an absolute principle that you cannot violate.

00:10:03.360 Whereas if you think that there is such a thing as forbidden knowledge, then you shouldn't

00:10:08.100 do that research because it could lead to bad places.

00:10:11.260 Have you ever thought about looking into the future rather than simply the past of why

00:10:17.600 we burn existing things rather than why we shouldn't do future things uh yeah no absolutely

00:10:23.740 librarians and archivists have to face this question kind of all the time you know what do

00:10:29.240 we keep yeah what do we what do we access what what do we accession into our collection so that's

00:10:36.700 a question of where we spend our acquisition budgets and where we then what where we don't

00:10:43.660 spend those budgets when we get gifted things or we go looking for archival collections you know

00:10:50.280 we know that there's a interesting individual we want to acquire his or her archive we approach

00:10:56.460 them or their family come to us after their death and say you know we think you know our father or

00:11:03.380 husband or wife's collection needs to be preserved and so there are these kind of decisions that are

00:11:09.320 made all the time but they actually affect long into the future and whole disciplines have been

00:11:16.460 formed by decisions that librarians made in my case my predecessors in the 17th century

00:11:22.140 were very interested in particularly Arabic texts actually more generally so we were the

00:11:31.780 first library in the west to acquire Chinese books in the early 17th century but also

00:11:36.540 particularly uh arabic texts and that was motivated partly by religious reasons we thought

00:11:44.700 my predecessors thought there might be you know biblical information information about

00:11:50.220 you know the time of christ that might be contained in arabic translation so let's let's

00:11:56.500 buy as many of those books as we can because we might find something but also it it translated

00:12:03.100 into the emergence of science so you know the early phase of the enlightenment you know the

00:12:08.480 late 17th century sees the founding of the royal society in london we see in oxford people like

00:12:13.640 robert boyle you know robert hook you know all these great william harvey all these great

00:12:19.400 scientists working and some of them thought that there might be interesting scientific information

00:12:27.000 in those books and so one of them that was acquired um was um a text of a greek geometer

00:12:36.940 apollonius of perga who wrote in the you know in in the i think the second century before the

00:12:44.940 christian era a famous book on the conic section so a kind of fundamental geotext in geometry

00:12:52.580 but the latin descent of that text which is originally written in greek translated into

00:13:00.380 latin in classical times and then copied and copied and copied eventually printed in the 16th

00:13:07.440 century had there was a book of it missing and so the scientists were all you know fascinated

00:13:17.240 by what was in the missing book and then into the Bodleian comes an Arabic translation of Apollonius

00:13:25.620 of Perga on the Koenig sections and guess what it contained the missing text wow and so it was

00:13:32.580 transliterated by my predecessor John Hudson it was then he then gave the the transliteration and

00:13:41.600 translation from the arabic to the professor of astronomy who just happened to be edmund halley

00:13:48.720 wow as in halley's comet as in halley's comet and halley then published it by oxford university press

00:13:57.460 and it made oxford university press which was new at that point as a new kid on the block

00:14:03.840 it made it into one of the great academic presses of europe it really put the press and the

00:14:09.460 university on the european map because everyone went wow they found the missing book of apollonius

00:14:15.640 of perga um and so you know that those acquisitions begin to shape scholarship

00:14:21.800 and you know we see this now in what is being fed into the large language models

00:14:29.960 it's shaping the way people understand the world and so these decisions we have to make in our

00:14:36.760 profession all the time because we know we make guesses about what the future will find interesting

00:14:43.380 sometimes we get it wrong so again my predecessors in the Bodleian um were lucky that we were what's

00:14:50.780 called a copyright library a library of legal deposit so in 1610 um and then it's enshrined

00:14:57.780 in law in 1710 we received free copies of every book published in Britain wow and we still do

00:15:06.260 a thousand books a day come into my library that physically that you you actually store somewhere

00:15:14.040 yes so how how big are are the spaces for you to be able to withstand we have a big off-site

00:15:20.480 storage facility high bay high density storage very efficient um uh so but in the early 19th

00:15:30.280 century where we had this right and the books were coming and obviously there were a lot fewer books

00:15:35.600 being published then so the books would come and my predecessors said no to some books because the

00:15:43.220 university was all male um it was really there to educate clergymen to some extent some other

00:15:50.000 professions like law and medicine um but we turned down we refused to take the first editions of

00:15:59.460 jane austen of the bronte sisters of mary shelley because why would we want books written by women

00:16:06.760 that are books in fiction why would anybody want to read those in the university

00:16:12.700 and so then you know for fast forward in time to the 1870s and the english faculty is founded

00:16:19.900 and the first professors want to teach you know the novel and they go to into the library to try

00:16:27.260 and find the first edition of persuasion or sense and sensibility or frankenstein and we don't have

00:16:32.320 the copies by that by this point those first editions are incredibly collectible they're very

00:16:38.040 valuable they cost a lot of money so this was we could have had them for free yikes yikes regret is

00:16:45.700 a difficult thing to navigate yeah so you know prejudging the future is is is not a not an easy

00:16:53.380 task but it has to be done and we're human beings now if i if somebody asked me who didn't know what

00:17:00.660 a professor does and i needed to give a one sentence answer i'd say well i guess my daily

00:17:07.100 job is broken up into three activities there is my research there's my teaching and there is my

00:17:13.740 administrative duties and then we can drill down into each of these part of research is supervising

00:17:19.440 students, writing papers, writing grants, and so on. If I were to ask you, now, you're a different

00:17:26.480 type of librarian than the community librarian, and we can actually talk about this after.

00:17:31.360 What, in a typical day, what are the key hats that Richard is wearing?

00:17:37.480 okay so it's predominantly administration and management so um uh so i chair committees

00:17:47.080 i receive and read reports often in draft before they go off to other of what

00:17:55.480 what's the okay so some of it will be budget okay um some of it will be kind of hr some of it will

00:18:04.500 be about buildings so we're building an extension to our off-site storage facility at the moment

00:18:09.600 and I'm the SRO or the senior responsible officer for that project so I chair a committee meeting

00:18:17.920 which has the project managers has the project accountant has stakeholders on it and we try to

00:18:26.860 govern the way that the project is is going we let a contract to a contractor to actually build it

00:18:34.080 um and you know decisions have to be made about this or that aspect of the build project

00:18:42.180 and i have to report to a committee of the university on who gave us the money to make

00:18:48.220 sure that we're spending it well um so you know that that's one specific project example

00:18:54.500 uh another thing that i do is um think about strategy so you know what is the library going

00:19:02.400 of focus on in the in the next five year period so we're beginning to think about what our next

00:19:07.880 strategy is going to be on and some of it will be really quite intellectually driven decisions

00:19:13.280 about um you know our engagement with ai for example some of it will be um thinking more about

00:19:22.780 our staff you know about staff training you know what skills do we need in our organization over

00:19:27.980 the next five years what are we lacking where do we need to hire in order to you know ensure that

00:19:34.260 we have the right set of skills to be able to run a library appropriate for the third decade of the

00:19:42.100 21st century some of it will be about some of my work in a day will be around development so you

00:19:49.000 know I'll be having lunch with somebody who might support us financially to do a particular piece of

00:19:54.940 work or i'll be writing um a letter to somebody asking them for money um uh so it's it's quite

00:20:05.140 varied um a lot of it is around management and administration some of it is around leadership

00:20:11.980 so it will be um giving a talk to um so next week i have to give a talk to the leaders of

00:20:20.140 digital operations across the university and to talk to them about how we're approaching various

00:20:27.220 uses of technology to preserve make available and manage information

00:20:35.100 or it will be giving a general update to the whole staff and that might be you know people who are

00:20:44.440 on the security, in the security team, right through to senior managers. And so, you know,

00:20:50.900 that kind of leadership role also extends to me writing for newspapers about what's happening

00:20:57.180 with book banning in America. So, you know, I, you know, there's a big piece of it, which is

00:21:04.320 around leadership. And then there is my duties, which are to the university. So by virtue of my

00:21:12.280 role I sit on various university committees that make decisions about the shape and the forward

00:21:19.720 progress of the whole university so trying to insert the needs of the library the museums and

00:21:28.880 the botanic garden which I also oversee and thinking about you know collections the way that

00:21:35.520 students and researchers interact with them but also the way in which our organizations also

00:21:41.420 also speak to a broader public and that's particularly important in an age when universities

00:21:47.320 are being um you know the value of them in society is being questioned um where there are other

00:21:54.000 players in the if you like in the education market space where um there are huge challenges around

00:22:01.980 funding around student fees you know all of these issues um and i think you know libraries and

00:22:08.020 museums have a role to play in you know that public debate the the the one hat that you didn't

00:22:17.940 mention that sort of resides in my romantic notion of what the head librarian at university

00:22:23.980 of oxford should be doing is you'd be wearing a smashing bow tie heading off to a sotheby's or

00:22:30.300 christy's auction okay and you're you're you know you're one of the key players in trying to pick up

00:22:36.640 some da vinci manuscript does that ever happen or does that only reside in my mind um so um actual

00:22:45.280 kind of you know major acquisitions i do get involved with from time to time mostly are

00:22:51.560 participation in the the marketplace for rare books and manuscripts and archives i leave to my

00:22:59.360 colleagues so they'll be doing placing bids in auctions and talking to dealers and and that kind

00:23:08.200 of stuff it's really the very you know the larger projects that i will get involved with

00:23:13.980 and sometimes because i actually come out of the rare books world so i i'm kind of known by a lot

00:23:21.160 of dealers i've made friends over the decades and they'll they sometimes they approach me directly

00:23:26.700 and say Richard we've got this amazing opportunity um and sometimes I can't stop myself from getting

00:23:34.060 involved because I just love it um and sometimes it's relationships you know with kind of writers

00:23:40.420 so John le Carré is one whose archive we have and I wrote to John le Carré when I was in a much more

00:23:47.840 junior role in the library you know still a senior role keeper of special collections that was my job

00:23:54.000 um and so i wrote to john lecari and said you know look you don't know me but i'm just writing

00:24:00.280 just in case you're thinking about what to do with your archive we'd love to have it in the

00:24:06.040 bodleian and he wrote me the most delightful letter back saying you know uh i as far as i'm

00:24:12.400 concerned um the bodleian would be george smiley's spiritual home wow is that communication

00:24:19.640 somewhere preserved and oh wow that's wonderful yeah yeah yeah so i got to know him you know i

00:24:27.960 went to visit him in cornwall and got to know his wife very well and um you know he deposited

00:24:35.540 part of the archive in his lifetime then the rest of it came after his death i now work very closely

00:24:41.200 with his children who are the you know run the literary estate we did a big exhibition we published

00:24:47.840 a book we've been working with the family on a documentary film so you know i i'm still very

00:24:55.040 involved in in all of that when i when i reached out to you a couple of months ago to to invite

00:25:02.020 you on the show i think i had included two links of previous chats i had on the show with two

00:25:09.960 two antiquarian uh dealers uh one of one is much younger tom ailing the other one is supposedly

00:25:17.980 sort of the granddaddy of that that world oh yeah yeah yeah harry bertenture did you know do you

00:25:23.240 know both of them or i i know of both of them i i know i don't know i haven't met tom um but he has

00:25:30.420 very kind of prominent social media presence right um and harry bertenture is yeah absolutely

00:25:36.740 Tencha is one of the great dealers, particularly in early books and manuscripts.

00:25:40.860 I have met him a number of times.

00:25:42.700 His books are too expensive for us.

00:25:45.960 Well, he was, I don't know if he'd want me to say this because he seems like a, you know, a modest guy.

00:25:51.460 But subsequent to our chat, he actually sent me as a, just as a, as a gift, you know, a few books.

00:26:00.660 And I just simply couldn't believe that I would be receiving such things.

00:26:04.280 I was very, very touched.

00:26:05.220 i know that early in the book probably in the first few pages you give a stat where you say

00:26:12.220 here's how many you know community libraries existed in britain at time x and here's how

00:26:18.800 fewer they are today in light of that trend are you pessimistic let's suppose i'm a undergraduate

00:26:27.020 student who's thinking of doing a master's in library studies and i go to see the eminent

00:26:33.260 richard at oxford to say what do you think should i be doing this are you telling me

00:26:38.440 sure there's still room for you or get out before the ship sinks no no no no that i'm very optimistic

00:26:45.200 about the profession uh i think we've got you know amazing um skills that are highly relevant

00:26:52.120 in the age of ai um you you and i think the the issue that i draw attention to in that part of

00:27:04.360 burning the books about public life we call them public libraries in the uk um is really

00:27:10.200 is not about the value of how society sees the value of libraries it's really much more about

00:27:19.260 um the the way in which decision making in government has passed from one set of if you

00:27:29.560 like internal rules to another and so the devolution of power of responsibility for

00:27:36.160 budgets to local authorities in the uk has meant they have been faced with very very difficult

00:27:42.340 decisions and so although we have lost a lot of public library branches um it's very uneven so

00:27:50.060 you'll find some local authorities who have maintained their funding and and their library

00:27:57.400 services absolutely vibrant whereas others for a whole variety of local reasons some of them to do

00:28:04.500 with the flavor of politics some some of them to do with just the pure chance of of how budgets

00:28:12.460 have evolved um that are very weaker so i'll give you one example which is the city of manchester so

00:28:19.140 where um andy burnham who as we speak is kind of probably going to become the next prime minister

00:28:25.620 has been mayor of the city of manchester he really gets libraries or has done in in his mayoral

00:28:33.100 authority and the public library system in manchester is a joy to behold it's really well

00:28:39.820 funded it's vibrant it's really busy you know it's absolutely fantastic um and so it really can be

00:28:49.380 done if there is the kind of the vision the political will but it also requires the head

00:28:55.400 of the library service the chief librarian to be a strong advocate to be out there with data with

00:29:03.220 examples with stories and mobilizing in the kind of public sphere for the value that libraries can

00:29:11.360 bring to the the people of the city of manchester and so it's not just a you know a thing where

00:29:18.420 librarians have to stand around weeping you know we actually have to get out there and be

00:29:24.580 really really strong and clever and smart and active participants in the political sphere

00:29:31.280 in local government and in the public sphere more generally do you think that and this may

00:29:37.260 on first sight you know first processing seem like a silly question but maybe it isn't

00:29:43.000 do you have to be a lover of books to be a librarian or you could be just a pragmatic

00:29:50.740 person says look this seems like a nice nine to five job you know i want to be left alone doing

00:29:57.200 you know not too much cortisol or do you have to be imbued with this passion for the book

00:30:02.680 to become a librarian i you definitely don't have to have that it's not a prerequisite

00:30:08.420 i i personally think it helps yeah um but there are a whole variety of jobs in libraries i mean

00:30:16.300 you know we have a finance team so you know our accountants don't you know they're not necessarily

00:30:22.600 right because that's not the first thing i look for when we're hiring you know an accountant we

00:30:28.280 want them to you know really be good a good accountant be good with finance um but if it

00:30:35.340 really helps if they're inspired by the mission of the organization and that mission of the

00:30:41.200 organization isn't to imbue the world with a love of books per se it's about providing

00:30:48.020 knowledge you know trusted knowledge to our community and some of that is through books

00:30:54.760 through physical books through ancient manuscripts through the archives of great writers like john

00:31:00.180 le carre and and kind of really loving those really helps a library to convey that mission

00:31:07.300 If you've got people who are passionate about it, who really see the value of it, who are good at communicating it, it's absolutely, it really, really helps because other people get excited.

00:31:20.200 They get kind of enthused and they kind of see the points that are being made very differently if they're reading some dry report.

00:31:30.480 so i think it's definitely not um and uh uh uh an absolute prerequisite but it really really helps

00:31:41.480 yeah that makes sense what is your if i may say omnivorous uh way of consuming books are you more

00:31:49.920 of a fiction guy are you more of a non-fiction guy i'm both i'm absolutely both so i have to

00:31:55.440 read fiction before i go to sleep at night okay so um you know and i i'm my wife is a great

00:32:02.400 fiction reader as well so i'm quite often sort of taking her uh recommendations um but also

00:32:10.060 i do quite a lot of public um in conversations with writers um and so i try to read you know

00:32:17.300 i did one with isabel allende um in new york last year for example so you know that was a great

00:32:24.240 opportunity to read as much of Isabel Allende as I could leading up to that um uh but I also

00:32:31.500 you know like to read stuff that's on the Booker Prize shortlist or as much as it as I can before

00:32:37.900 the the ceremony but then also um I'm a historian so you know I I like I'm you know I actually I've

00:32:45.760 lent it to a colleague the new history of the Weimar Republic by Katja Hoyer um I'm reading

00:32:51.720 this really interesting book called we are not machines by sarah o'connor who's a financial

00:32:56.120 times journalist um i've just reviewed a couple of books of the observer on data um and i love

00:33:03.720 photography so um you know i'm constantly buying new books on on photography so i'm yeah not yeah

00:33:11.080 he probably behind me this i'm i'm doing this from home and uh i'm meant to be on a one-in-one

00:33:17.100 out um regime but it's everything is double stacked it's there are piles of books on the

00:33:23.340 floor i just i can't stop myself one of the things that uh i'm most looking forward to in moving from

00:33:30.080 our montreal home to our mississippi home is that the dollar goes much further in mississippi so

00:33:36.380 if we can close on the book that we're thinking of getting i am going to be able to have the most

00:33:42.580 glorious personal library possible. Whereas here, everything's kind of caving in on me,

00:33:47.240 all my books. And I tend to, unlike you, I wish I had your sort of ability to navigate through

00:33:54.400 fiction and nonfiction. I would say 95% of what I read is nonfiction, to my great chagrin,

00:34:02.620 because I know that there is endless great novels that I'm missing out on. So I've been

00:34:08.480 trying to remedy that slowly uh okay but surely uh what are some typical personality traits i

00:34:17.900 ask this again from the perspective of psychologists is there a typical personality

00:34:23.520 profile of a good librarian now of course here i'm asking this from the perspective 0.76

00:34:28.600 of we have a stereotype of the sort of tight you know uh a somewhat anal librarian with the 0.89

00:34:39.360 with the bun surely not surely you certainly don't fit that mold is there such a stereotype 0.65

00:34:44.680 or it's complete nonsense i mean i i kind of i i find those stereotypes intensely annoying because

00:34:51.400 um you know it may have been true 60 or 70 years ago i don't know because i i i you know i'm 62 so

00:35:00.960 i don't really remember that era very much um but i think there are a huge variety of types of roles

00:35:08.740 that a library needs and certainly some of those are kind of detailed focus methodical process

00:35:15.620 driven uh people who you know really you know are quite happy doing a a kind of task that requires

00:35:26.600 them to focus deeply on detail and we absolutely need people like that and they tend to be and

00:35:34.620 again this is an incorrect stereotype they tend to be people who are quite happy not to be out

00:35:41.540 there on the front right um people facing they're quite happy to be in the back room yeah actually

00:35:49.080 um we also need people who are you know have the personalities that are very engaging with

00:35:56.040 people and we you know that's a very very you know libraries are full of those kind of people

00:36:03.380 we absolutely need them um to be not just on the front desk of a library on an information desk

00:36:10.980 But increasingly in a library like mine, actually out working in scholarly communities outside of the library, you know, going to visit research teams, you know, just talking to a colleague about, you know, the team we have in our medical libraries who spend most of their time actually in the medical sciences division,

00:36:34.080 talking to researchers or in the hospitals talking to clinicians talking to students in the

00:36:40.080 um you know are about to go on their ward rounds um you know teaching them about the latest you

00:36:49.480 know online resources you know the medical um medical information that they can access on their

00:36:56.580 laptop or on their smartphone so these are um these are very different kinds of combinations

00:37:04.240 of skills that you need um i think being service oriented being user oriented is absolutely a

00:37:12.180 prerequisite of of libraries these days um but also we have you know it specialists so we have

00:37:22.220 data science people you know we have people who are specialists in metadata and again some of

00:37:27.880 those actually you know increasingly they they work much of the time from home they don't really

00:37:32.940 need to be in the physical library space all the time um and so there are you know we're lucky in

00:37:40.320 having these varieties of roles and not just the stereotype ancient stereotypes the cheesy

00:37:47.740 stereotype of the betweeded bespectacled book stamping shush person that's so anachronistic

00:37:57.540 and it gets me hot under the collar well my apologies for having upset you no no no no I

00:38:04.740 I know exactly where you're coming from and I think I look at the you know we have a very good

00:38:09.700 graduate trainee program in the library and so you know I look at young graduates who are coming

00:38:15.360 in to do their years um kind of taster year in in the library world and we revolve them around

00:38:22.240 different types of function we also set them projects to do um next week i'm going to you

00:38:28.520 know we have a day where they all kind of report on their projects to each other and to to people

00:38:34.120 like me and it's so inspiring they're so clever you know they're so articulate they've got brilliant

00:38:40.880 ideas and i just feel so excited for the industry thinking of these this great talent who are going

00:38:46.940 to go out and you know working university libraries national libraries some of them

00:38:51.380 working for law firms some of them are going to be in public libraries um some of them are you

00:38:57.800 know going to be working where the word library doesn't appear in their job title at all um but

00:39:03.020 they're still going to be doing that kind of work so you know i'm really optimistic about the future

00:39:08.560 And I think that the character traits that we need are actually more complex.

00:39:14.300 And I think the opportunities, what we have to do a lot more is thinking about skills and training and continuous development of our workforce.

00:39:26.300 Do you ever get, this is not a natural segue, but I thought of it as you were speaking, although I was focused on what you were saying.

00:39:32.600 do you ever get into tricky situations not unlike how for example museums will suddenly have a knock

00:39:41.340 on the door where some where the Egyptian government comes along and says hey that

00:39:45.580 beautiful collection that you have it's time to return it do you get similar situations where

00:39:51.100 you've got this incredible collection that somebody else says that belongs to us give it back

00:39:56.660 um i i think within the within the bodleian i've only experienced that a couple of times

00:40:03.560 um and it's been slightly unusual one of them has come from the republic of ireland

00:40:09.940 um so we were there's a famous manuscript called the annals of inish fallon that we own

00:40:17.620 that was given to us in the early 18th century actually by an irish clergyman and

00:40:24.540 various people have claimed

00:40:28.820 that this is a great Irish national treasure

00:40:30.980 and should be returned to

00:40:32.920 Killarney from where it came

00:40:37.500 or where it resided at one point

00:40:39.820 but that particular example

00:40:45.280 is one where I absolutely don't feel

00:40:48.420 that there's any moral case for it to be returned

00:40:51.240 and I continue to point out to the people

00:40:53.760 who claim that it should be that the library of trinity college dublin contains hundreds of

00:41:00.620 english medieval manuscripts and i'm sure that they're urging the my counterpart helen shenton

00:41:07.300 at trinity to return all of those manuscripts to england um so uh you know that that's one example

00:41:14.920 but certainly the library community has faced you know does share some of those issues you know there

00:41:21.300 are some um you know jewish uh um uh stolen uh property um stolen by the nazis redistributed

00:41:33.440 you know one thinks of artwork you think of the monuments men that film i don't know that

00:41:39.060 but actually the monuments men started out with books yes and that was covered in your book and

00:41:47.140 i thought that was one of the most compelling parts of the book yes yeah yeah so extremely

00:41:53.160 interesting how um you know the nazis wanted to control knowledge in terms of you know jewish and

00:42:01.260 the you know the jewish knowledge often in the hebrew language or in yiddish and and and then

00:42:08.200 you know european vernaculars um and then you know there was this process of trying to return it and

00:42:15.320 And to some extent, many of those stolen books ended up on the shelves of not the specialist institute that was run by the kind of Nazi Alfred Rosenberg, but by in ordinary German libraries, university libraries, public libraries.

00:42:32.700 And there is still a team that is finding those books on the shelves of those libraries and trying to reunite them with the heirs of the legitimate owners.

00:42:42.560 So that process does continue. And certainly in the market, in the trade for old books and manuscripts, it's one of the issues now that everybody looks out for. Does the provenance trail lead back to Nazi ownership?

00:43:02.180 what would be in your wildest dreams the singular book that oxford doesn't have in its

00:43:12.240 in its library that you would be so desperate to acquire ah well that's a very interesting

00:43:19.100 question i i mean i i don't think there is a single book there are a number of books which

00:43:24.380 i would like us to own um which we don't own that are rather expensive um in terms of printing

00:43:34.140 you know so you know i mentioned i i have a kind of real interest in the history of photography

00:43:39.440 and um there are several kind of landmark books in the history of photography that we don't own

00:43:46.980 that are very rare, very expensive.

00:43:49.840 One of them is about photographs taken in the American Civil War,

00:43:56.680 and it's one of the first photo books published.

00:44:02.140 And, you know, I think I'm trying to remember now

00:44:06.260 if there is even a copy in the UK at all.

00:44:10.280 So, you know, that's one example.

00:44:13.320 um but you know it's i i don't think we have a particular kind of target like that um i think

00:44:23.320 it's you know there are kind of you to some extent you have to go with what the market has

00:44:28.780 um occasionally you know that there's a particular individual with a particular book

00:44:34.040 and if you're lucky enough to get to know them you can kind of gently make the suggestion right

00:44:41.380 I did this once with a former Oxford alum or an Oxford alum who ended up in Australia and had developed a passion for collecting books when he was an undergraduate at Oxford.

00:44:55.780 And he ended up as being a judge in Australia.

00:44:59.800 And I happened to be in Melbourne and went to visit him.

00:45:03.880 And he proudly showed me off his collection.

00:45:06.940 And I oohed and aahed over a particular thing, which was the traveling library of Charles I.

00:45:16.340 Wow.

00:45:17.780 And you made an approach?

00:45:20.340 And I just said, you know, a lovely man called John Emerson, I said, John, you know, this would be so, it would make such a great acquisition for the Bodley and, you know, we would absolutely love to have it.

00:45:34.780 And I didn't say anything more.

00:45:36.080 I just sort of said we'd absolutely love to have it.

00:45:39.800 And because he developed his passion for collecting in the Bodleian

00:45:43.820 while he was an undergraduate, it must have sunk in.

00:45:47.380 And then when he died, it was a provision in his will.

00:45:50.660 Oh, it was bequeathed to you.

00:45:52.100 Wow.

00:45:53.280 Well, I'm going to answer my own question.

00:45:55.940 What would be the book that I would want to have?

00:45:58.840 Oh, yeah.

00:45:59.940 As an evolutionist, it shouldn't be difficult.

00:46:02.240 It will be first edition, Charles Darwin on the Organist Species.

00:46:06.080 do you have a first edition we do we do actually i think we might even have more than one copy

00:46:11.080 um oh so in the same way that you threw that little seed into that gentleman's brain

00:46:16.900 should you ever wish to get rid of of your multiple copies then dr sad here would be happy

00:46:24.660 okay okay you've been put on go ahead can i ask you another question which is what were the books

00:46:31.760 that you read that made you the person you are today oh that is such a good question so i mean

00:46:36.880 the easiest way to answer it would be in terms of what we're talking about now evolution is in my

00:46:44.100 first semester as a doctoral student i studied at cornell uh the professor who i was taking an

00:46:51.320 advanced social psychology course about halfway through the semester he assigned a book called

00:46:56.420 Homicide, which was written by two of the pioneers of evolutionary psychology, a husband and wife

00:47:02.040 team, Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, where they were studying cross-temporal and cross-cultural

00:47:10.700 manifestations of criminality to demonstrate that they happen for the exact same reasons,

00:47:17.120 irrespective of culture or era. And the reason why they happen in similar fashions is because

00:47:24.060 of these kind of evolutionary underpinnings so for example the most dangerous man the most

00:47:30.300 dangerous person in a woman's life irrespective of any culture that's ever been studied is usually

00:47:35.180 her long-term male partner it's not some you know rapist that's hiding in the bushes it's her male

00:47:40.960 partner who usually goes into a homicidal rage if he either has suspected or realized infidelity

00:47:48.200 and then then there's an evolutionary argument as to why men have evolved that tendency to be

00:47:54.780 so sexually territorial it's related to paternity uncertainty and so on and so forth well when i

00:47:59.840 read that book that was my epiphany that was my eureka moment i will now use that framework

00:48:07.400 to apply it to the areas that interest me in human behavior consumer behavior economic behavior and

00:48:13.980 And hence, I ended up eventually founding the field of evolutionary consumer behavior, meaning the Darwinian underpinnings of what makes us consumatory in our nature.

00:48:23.240 So I would have to say that that is the incontrovertible book that affected me the most in terms of my academic trajectory.

00:48:32.120 Okay. And have you kept that first, your first copy of that?

00:48:36.340 I do. I have it. I have it in my office, actually, which I'll soon be vacating.

00:48:41.380 it's there with all of my notes as a doctoral student yeah so it's it's all there so it has a

00:48:47.020 kind of talismanic quality for you exactly right there's another book that really meant a lot to

00:48:52.600 me although I didn't eventually pursue that path although it is based on Alan Turing a fellow Brit

00:48:58.900 okay so I my undergrad was in mathematics and computer science and I took an advanced

00:49:05.400 theoretical computer science course called Formal Languages by Hopcroft and Ullman,

00:49:11.760 where they talk about Turing machines and so on. And I was absolutely blown away that a human being

00:49:19.120 can be able to generate this kind of thought process, which is very difficult to explain

00:49:25.780 to someone who hasn't actually studied Turing's work. It's simply astounding that a human mind

00:49:33.160 can come up with some of the stuff that, of course, his end was a tragedy. So that would be

00:49:38.280 another book that I would put. But speaking of books and books on books, I discussed this before

00:49:43.600 we went on air. I have a small but interesting collection on books on books, two of which you

00:49:49.660 said you're actually very familiar with. This one right here, A Splendor of Letters, The Permanence

00:49:56.080 of Books in an Intermittent World, and another one, The Library of Fragile History. And you said

00:50:02.060 that you know both of the co-authors anything you want to say about these books and any other

00:50:07.180 books on books that you think our listeners and viewers should be checking out oh okay well um i

00:50:14.260 think you know both those books are sort of general histories of of libraries i think nicholas

00:50:20.480 basbane's is a great kind of advocate for the library as a kind of institution as a kind of

00:50:26.820 concept and idea um i think um andrew pedigree and arthur van der weduwen's uh library of fragile

00:50:34.820 history um again a very i've reviewed it actually for the financial times weekend um so you could

00:50:42.120 check my review out but i think one of the arguments i say about it there is that um i

00:50:48.820 disagree with the idea of fragility i think um i i don't i don't see libraries as kind of fragile

00:50:56.960 institutions um i think they've they've been much stronger certainly there've been plenty examples

00:51:02.240 of their destruction their loss but you know the fact that you know the first libraries that we

00:51:08.060 know of and can kind of recognize actually really quite strongly were in the you know the second and

00:51:16.600 third millennia before the christian era and that the same functions are still being performed today

00:51:23.800 i think isn't it shows the extraordinary enduring power of libraries of that concept of being

00:51:30.780 actually quite a strong one um so i kind of disagreed with their kind of fundamental

00:51:37.520 sort of idea and they they end their book on quite a kind of downbeat note um which again i i i i

00:51:45.780 think they're right to point out the risks and the dangers that we face around the idea of

00:51:53.060 preserving and accumulating knowledge and to do so on behalf of communities rather than on behalf

00:52:00.660 of shareholders but I think you know libraries have proved themselves to be extraordinarily

00:52:09.060 adaptable, agile, vibrant. And, you know, we're already thinking about the future. So that,

00:52:20.120 you know, that inheritance that we have of long term thinking, that actually Nicholas

00:52:26.700 Basbane's book is very strong on, continues to this day. And I think that certainly my library

00:52:36.000 is as busy as it, I think,

00:52:39.160 has probably ever been in its history.

00:52:42.460 You know, its reading rooms are full.

00:52:44.700 Our online search engine,

00:52:47.280 which we call Solo Search Oxford Libraries Online,

00:52:50.860 is searched a million times a week.

00:52:53.880 You know, so users still use us

00:52:59.380 at an industrial scale.

00:53:02.260 Wonderful.

00:53:03.560 Speaking of sort of the future,

00:53:05.160 because you're speaking in a very optimistic manner what are some projects that you're you

00:53:11.340 not as representative of the library you yourself are currently working on that you'd be willing to

00:53:17.400 discuss with us oh i'm working on the next book i'm doing this okay anything that you'd like and

00:53:22.060 then we'll we'll wrap sure um well i'm quite involved with a group of colleagues in forming

00:53:27.200 a new organization called the libraries alliance in the uk so this is to try to bring the whole

00:53:34.440 library community together so there are professional groups of libraries like one for

00:53:40.860 public libraries there's one for libraries in higher education there's one for school libraries

00:53:48.260 there's one for prison libraries there's one for libraries in the health service but actually we

00:53:56.000 rarely speak with a single voice and that I think has posed some problems for us when trying to

00:54:03.540 advocate for the role of libraries to government departments for example where um the brief in

00:54:10.340 government there is a minister a minister for libraries um who has you know literally said to

00:54:16.860 me you know the trouble with the library world is richard i don't know who to go and talk to

00:54:21.300 right so um we are now trying to solve that problem by creating this kind of umbrella

00:54:27.060 organization that can speak for the library sector as a whole and we're just in the process

00:54:33.140 of forming this body called the libraries alliance you can find a kind of um a preliminary web page

00:54:39.380 for us um so that's that that's that's something that's kind of preoccupying me um at the moment

00:54:46.160 i don't really um have the time for a new book i have various ideas for one but i'm mostly writing

00:54:54.280 pieces for um for newspapers and for magazines on particular issues um um i have this book review

00:55:03.100 i um i was telling you uh about earlier um that i just just filed my my copy for the observer

00:55:10.960 newspaper on two books about data okay very cool so one called data empire and the other called

00:55:17.780 prophecy um and you know they all relate to you know the the kind of the world of data and the

00:55:24.480 world of ai so that you know that that that kind of keeps me keeps me fairly occupied well i'll end

00:55:31.960 it on in the following manner i've often been asked hey professor sad what are three you know

00:55:37.860 life prescriptions that you can uh bestow upon us you know and i usually say yes i've got three of

00:55:45.200 them read read and read do you agree with those prescriptions totally 100 yes okay if only i could

00:55:55.180 apply those prescriptions to my teenage children then i might be deserving of a nobel prize okay

00:56:01.960 okay yeah well um i again i'm an i'm an optimist i detect um you know um there's a kind of also

00:56:10.740 return to the physical book and i find that with you know my own children are slightly they're in

00:56:16.300 their 20s actually one that one in her 30s now um that they they're kind of fed up with renting

00:56:23.580 they want to own things again the kind of streaming services have kind of lost their

00:56:28.640 appeal they want that they they're and they're going back to the analog you know they want the

00:56:33.280 physical book they're buying physical permanence right i mean absolutely you know something that

00:56:39.020 you can scribble in and look back on with fondness or bequeath to your children or um and

00:56:45.820 not get sucked into this annual um you know subscription payment cycle and so vinyl records

00:56:53.880 analog photography you know the printed book love it all coming back in fashion by young people

00:56:59.740 they're cool they're very cool i love that thank you listen what a pleasure having you thank you

00:57:05.580 so much for agreeing to come on the show. Stay on the line so we could say goodbye offline. Thank

00:57:11.660 you so much, Richard, and hopefully I get to meet you in person soon. I hope so too. I've

00:57:15.880 really enjoyed our conversation. Likewise. Cheers.

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - July 06, 2026

Richard Ovenden, OBE - Author of ＂Burning the Books＂ & Bodley's Librarian (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1016)

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