Seguimos en La Libertad
So, where did the intellectual life of Montevideo go after so many years of economic failures, repression and exodus? How is cultural life altered under those circumstances and how does a public cultural life re-emerge when the expected places of sustenance disappear? 
In the city, what do its workers do when the editorial houses, newspapers, academies, theatres and movie houses close? What happens when 400,000 people of a population of 3 million leave a country over a period of twenty years? Who or what fills this vacuum and with what substance? What is now possible for people once excluded from active participation in these institutions? What resources and interests do they have?
A digital mirror
I have to ask myself these questions as I sort through the catalog of items owned by the university’s libraries—over 15,000 written, recorded and published by Uruguayans about some aspect of Uruguay geography, nature, economy, politics, cultures, architecture, military, literature, its young, old, poor, sick. We even have books published at different dates about the state-of-the-art in orthodontics in Uruguay, of interest if only because they are illustrated.
Every month, library staff trundle off hundreds of these books for digitization at some facility and return them after this adventure back to their customary shelves to wait for someone, like me, to pull them off the shelf again and make their acquaintance. The process of digitization far outstrips our desire and ability to make these books available online. We know that a large majority of these books will not reveal the content of its pages for decades as long as copyright laws protected them. So why go through this expense?
The original impulse for Google to undertake this massive program was to make the books discoverable. That is, make it easy for people to come across the titles online, become acquainted with the books, and abracadabra, buy them. Never mind that most of these books are out of print or only available in local markets, not to be found at the fingertips, of say, the 400, 000 Uruguayans living far from home who might be interested in something about themselves.
The books that Google had in mind for their venture were not these from our research collections with relative little economic but incalculable cultural interest; however, recognizing the uniqueness of the Benson Latin American Collection Google still negotiated with the University of Texas to duplicate as much as possible of the entire collection.
Of course, there are persuasive institutional arguments to persist with the digitization so the process goes on. For one, we have learned after several natural disasters that the safest thing to do to preserve texts is to reproduce them, a version of the LOCKSS principle, Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe. Dozens of people are kept busy with this activity and many more with the debate as to why and whether it should be done, what it all means for whom, and who pays.
In the case of the digitization of the library books, Google has the incentive to pick up most of the present costs with the hopes that readers will click the various commercial links on their search pages. Ostensibly, this generates consumer traffic.
As far as accessing the full-text of the books, copyright remains an insoluble bottleneck. After the books are digitized and cataloged, only the bibliographical information and a few snippets, sometimes pages, are displayed on line. But, suppose, that copyright issues did not exist, what difference would it make it to have the full-text of these books online? And, how could we know how and to whom it would make a difference?
New cultural patterns
Uruguayan cultural meteorologist, Pablo Rocco, is right to note the multiple factors acting to inhibit older, still familiar patterns of interaction among artists, writers, musicians and their publics, resulting in the desertion and eventual disappearance of many centrally located public places like cafés, theatres, and bookstores. These were the places where artists shaped their style, demeanor, arguments and inserted themselves into national and international cultural movements in literature, theatre, music, and the plastic and graphic arts.
Today, however, demonstrations and performances enliven plazas and create interest along familiar streets now flanked by hotels, office buildings, conference centers but also with cafes, bookstores, movie houses. For the literate and cultured groups that have been forced by circumstances to the periphery of urban life, there are now online journals, interactive radio productions, and virtual workshops. Thoughtful examples of these are Abrapalabra, El Espectador’s Café Torrado and Gabriela Onetto’s Letras Virtuales.
Further away but with increasing effect and importance to Uruguay-and the rest of the world- are the various solidarity groups exiled in Spain, in the U.S. and other parts of Latin America who contribute remittances as well as support for the Madres y Familiares de Uruguayos Detenidos-Desaparecidos and similar associations. Other groups have coalesced to take up issues related to the environment, sustainability, violence against women, gay rights, 
and inequality.
We will turn to these lugares de encuentro-places of encounter-over the next few weeks to inquire about the roles the old Lucuix library and the Benson Latin American Collection play in the movement of cultures across continents.
Photos courtesy of Marco Lovatto, Google Earth I.D. 1102615; and L. Yomango at rebelArte
