Globalizing the Library focuses on the globalization of information and the library in the period following the Second World War. Providing an examination of the ideas and aspirations surrounding information and the library, as well as the actual practices and actions of information professionals from the United States, Britain, and those working with organizations such as Unesco to develop library services, this book tells an important story about international history that also provides insight into the history of information, globalization, and cultural relations. Exploring efforts to help build library services and train a cohort of professional librarians around the globe, the book examines countries in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific during the period of the Cold War and decolonization. Using the ideas of ‘library diplomacy’ and ‘library imperialism’ to frame Anglo-American involvement in this work, Laugesen examines the impact library development work had on various countries. The book also considers what might have motivated nations in the global South to use foreign aid to help develop their library services and information infrastructure. Globalizing the Library prompts reflection on the way in which library services are developed and the way professional knowledge is transferred, while also illuminating the power structures that have shaped global information infrastructures. As a result, the book should be essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of libraries, development, and information. It should also be of great interest to information professionals and information historians who are reflecting critically on the way information has been transferred, consumed, and shaped in the modern world.

This book focuses on the late colonial history of Zambia and Malawi, which between 1953 and 1963 were part of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Although there were many links in their history and between their populations, the two territories (British protectorates under Colonial Office control) contrasted greatly in power structures, in their economies, and in their development. Europeans living in Northern Rhodesia, with a power base in the mining economy, were able to establish a dominant position in the territory after the Second World War. By the 1950s it looked as though they would have, with Southern Rhodesian Europeans, a long hegemony, gaining independence from Britain as a new Dominion, which would mean control over both Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland through the Federation. Thus, white ethnicity and ideology are essential factors in this book relating to the struggle for power from just before the Second World War up to the 1960s. However, crises in 1959 and 1960 led to the collapse of the Federation. A second focus is on issues of social and economic development. For Africans in Nyasaland, and in rural parts of Northern Rhodesia, there was a relatively weak economy in this period, a pattern of limited cash crop production, while many people became caught up in labour migration, subordinate to powerful European-dominated economic forces within southern Africa. This meant that colonial policies aimed at rural development were fundamentally flawed. The book also looks at the actual nature of rural economic change (as opposed to colonial policies) and discusses alternative visions of the future which were put forward. The argument is put that historians have often concentrated on the activities of the main nationalist movements in Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia, seeing them as bringing progress away from colonialism and towards independence. Here there is an attempt to draw out the complexities of life, and a variety of responses in the colonial situation, progress coming in a number of forms, but not always being achieved.

Beginning with 1981, merger decisions of the Corporation are published separately as vol. 2 of the Annual report.