Week three: June 15-19, 2026

This is not my typical reflection on what I learned this week. Instead, it is a reflection on what stayed with me.

The week felt like a blending of the old and the new. My favourite experiences were the preservation labs, Oak Street Library, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, and the Lincoln Home. At the same time, the other sessions throughout the week—whether discussions on access, evolving library services, or the role of technology—quietly reinforced the same underlying theme: that libraries are constantly balancing innovation with responsibility.

What resonated with me most was the idea of preservation. The preservation labs highlighted the extraordinary amount of labour, expertise, and care required to ensure that information remains accessible across time. It made me think about librarianship beyond the immediate and the contemporary. We often focus on meeting present information needs, but our work is equally about stewardship, ensuring that future generations can engage with the ideas, stories, and records that came before them. Access is not only about the present user. It is also a responsibility to the future. This became even more apparent in discussions of digital preservation—how we safeguard born-digital materials, maintain formats, and ensure long-term accessibility in an ever-changing technological landscape. Even in sessions that focused on digital access and emerging tools, I found myself returning to this idea—how do we ensure that what we create and share today remains meaningful and accessible tomorrow?

Visiting the Lincoln Library and Museum and Lincoln’s home was profound and somewhat sobering, particularly because the visit took place just two days before Juneteenth. Although I am not African American, I come from a formerly colonised nation where emancipation carries deep historical and cultural significance. This visit reminded me that libraries are not merely repositories of information. They are custodians of memory and places where societies preserve, confront, and make sense of their histories. In that sense, the work of stewardship I saw in the preservation labs felt directly connected to what I experienced there—without that ongoing care, the stories, documents, and spaces that shape our understanding of figures like Lincoln, American history, and the broader history of emancipation, would not endure in the same way.

One moment, in particular, stayed with me. I saw a document written by Abraham Lincoln on October 3, 1845, my birthday, albeit separated by 145 years. There was something deeply human about that connection across time. Reading his thoughts on preventing the spread of slavery, ideas that I imagine were considered radical in their day, reinforced for me that documents are never simply pieces of paper. They capture moments of courage, conflict, and conviction that continue to shape how we understand ourselves and the world around us.

This week reminded me that libraries exist in conversation with time. We preserve the past, serve the present, and create pathways for future generations to engage with both. There is something profoundly meaningful about that responsibility, and this week allowed me to see it in a very tangible way.