Expanding Exchanges

Abstract

Angeles has been making a conscious effort to expand exchanges, concentrating especially on exchanges with the new nations of Asia and Africa. The problems are enormous but so are the rewards. Because the institutiqns approached are usually very new many are not yet fully organized to handle exchanges. Some are so new they haven't quite finished congratulating themselves on existing at all. The director of the new Ghanaian library school, for example, rather wryly commented in a recent report that since he was writing the day after the opening of the school, he hadn't anything to say about its past, couldn't find much to say about its present, and had perforce to deal with its devoutly-to-be-hoped-for future.On the other hand, some of the oldest learned societies in the world flourish in the new nations. One of our recent requests for a new exchange went to the library of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Alexandria. When that library was organized (in the tenth century), herds of bison were still roaming the North American continent and baskets and fishhooks were our most magnificent cultural achievements. In one sense, the very newness of the recently or soon-tobe independent nations helps in the development of cultural exchanges. N ationa! pride, recently awakened, and therefore often fiercely intense, as well as a hunger for long-suppressed intellectual growth combined with the traditional impatience of youth is spurring the new nations into feverish publishing and educational programs. From Elizabethville,