African Studies Library open house today 1/30 at 11am
From the African Studies Library:
Please visit the African Studies Library this Wednesday (Jan. 30th),
from 11am to 1pm for an open house
as we host a visit by Jane Meyers,
president of the Lubuto Library Project in Zambia.
Can you imagine life without knowledge or access to your local history, or stories in your language? It would be unthinkable here in the United States, but for Zambia this became a reality when community libraries throughout the country were dispersed and ended at the nation’s independence in 1964. The goal of this act was to encourage unity,
“One Zambia, One Nation”.
Years later, the Lubuto Library Project is working to address the loss of this literary heritage, seeking out and preserving Zambian language literature. In many cases, these works are only available in places like the Library of Congress or our own African Studies Library here at BU.
The project had its humble beginnings as a reading room in a shelter for street children in the streets of Lusaka, Zambia and has grown in scope until today, with cooperation of the Zambian Library Service, Zambian National Archives and the Zambian Reprographics Society, this ambitious project aims to give Zambia back its literary heritage once more.
Please stop by the African Studies Library
and hear Jane share about this exciting project.
There will be light refreshments.
About Jane Meyers
Jane Kinney Meyers is a professional librarian with 35 years’ experience working and living in Africa, consulting, teaching and working with scores of libraries throughout the continent and participating in the formulation of National Information Policies of Malawi and Zambia. She lived in Malawi for nearly four years, developing a network of research libraries for the country’s Ministry of Agriculture on a World Bank project and pioneering CD-ROM applications for Africa in the mid-1980s. Ten years later she returned to neighboring Zambia and became increasingly involved with services and advocacy for street children, eventually creating a library for them at a drop-in centre in Lusaka.
After living and working in Zambia from 1998 to 2001, Jane returned to the U.S. and developed the concept, approach and organization of the Lubuto Library Project. Honorary lifetime membership in the Zambia Library Association awarded to her in 2006 was joined by wide acclaim in the library profession, including the Special Libraries Association’s Dow Jones Factiva Leadership award in 2007, 2008 Distinguished Alumnus of the Year, University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies, 2009 ALA President’s Citation for International Innovation, 2010 International award from the International Library and Information Group of the U.K.’s Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, and the 2012 Fastcase 50 Award. She was the recipient of ALA’s 2012 John Ames Humphry/OCLC/Forest Press Award for International Librarianship, and Lubuto has been nominated for the Swedish Academy of Arts’ prestigious Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2009, 2010, 1012 and 2013
