Richard Ovenden, OBE

speaker

227 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 6 Feb

Richard Ovenden, OBE’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

And sometimes it helps you defend your own argument because you're challenged by other arguments.

But sometimes you actually change yourselves.

And I think that's one thing that libraries do.

The third thing that libraries do is protect the rights of citizens.

And that's where things like legal information.

If you're being legally challenged, you can go and find information that will support you.

In a law library, you can apply for a ticket, come and use the law library or ask for legal information in your public library.

So that's just one example of that sort of the rights of citizens and particularly in archives where things like land registries exist.

you know, Companies House, all of these things are fixities in an increasingly disputed world in which we live, where facts are more challenged.

And the fourth value of libraries and archives is that they provide that fixity.

They are points of reference.

You can go back to a source of truth in a library and say, actually, this is what somebody wrote down.

And they said it in this publication and you can come and see it for yourself.

And we do that.

Obviously, we did that in the physical realm.

We do it in the digital realm now, too.

And the final version is around the identity of communities and society.

So if you think of local history, you know, we met a few weeks ago in Sydney and the State Library of New South Wales collects documents.

everything that they can around the state of New South Wales, the city of Sydney.

And that's everything from, you know, original documents from the first settlers, early maps, drawings to social media.

Showing 201–220 of 227 · page 11 of 12