By Noé Nessel | April 12, 2023
IASSIST program sponsorship was given to the program Big Data: Cities of the Future (Workshop) held on April 4, 2023 in Buenos Aires, Argentina hosted by the “Martín Del Barco Centenera” Library. The website for the now completed event is available. The IASSIST liaison to the event Noé Nessel offers this reflection.
Noé Nessel
If you are reading these lines, I’m sure we’ll meet physically at an International Congress at some point. My work is laborious but very satisfying: library work that represents a large area of the Earth, Cuenca del Plata (the River Plate Basin).
In this part of the world, most organizations develop outside the tax system. This makes it difficult to implement professional initiatives based on other currencies and contracts with foreign parties.
However, IASSIST has been made visible by more than 50 institutions, including the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina, the Leopoldo Lugones Library and the Ministry of Science, Technology and Productive Innovation.
Prevailing populism, for example, makes it difficult to create new civil societies, distorts governmental data, and generates economic policies that are counterproductive to the academic middle class.
Hopefully, within two decades, lasting ties between information professionals in the Southern Cone, the United States, and Canada have emerged. The few emerging leaders in Latin America are practically helpless in organizational conditions that make it impossible to obtain the necessary institutional guarantees to implement projects with other continents. As a global example, we are all aware of the relative viability of the European Union – Mercosur Agreement.
In this decade many of my principal teachers have died, as have several National Library authorities. The pandemic, in turn, was extremely detrimental to the younger population of Argentina’s educational system.
On the one hand, the loss of the intellectual minds and on the other hand, the lack of cognitive training of adolescents have curbed the representation of more Argentines abroad. Library and archival science are quite invisible.