The future of old books: the LDI programme

I came for the first time to Indonesia in March 1970, for one full year of field work in pesantren, Islamic religious boarding schools. A collected as many books as I could buy and since then the collection has grown. But now my wife and I decided to move to a nice appartment. It is not so small, but anyway, many books had to be removed.

We started last year already with donations of nearly 1.000 books to the IUR, Islamic University of Rotterdam. Now many more followed: in 51 boxes (to a maximum of 20 kilo, average 40 books per box) and 69 somewhat smaller boxes, a total of 3090 books have now been selected for the programme LDI, Library Development Indonesia. It began in 2004 as a support for the new library of the Christian University of Ambon, which lost all its books in 2000-2002 during the interreligious conflicts in the Moluccas. My donation will partly go to Banjarmasin, for the Christian Theological Seminary and the Islamic University.
Many books went through my hands, who were never read. It reminded me of Mitsuo Nakamura who returned after his first dield work in Indonesia with so much material, that his promotor complained: you have so much different material, wenough for ten dissertation. So many more books to read, to write about, but there is a time to acknowledge that no new subject can be scrutinized in depth and in detail. After two decades of conversation with Muslims in Indonesia and writing about them , mostly about the way they wereconfronted with modern times, and also some historical material (1970-1990), a concentrated more on Catholics (1990-2015).
I do not know what will come in the next decade or so. But I am happy that the LDI will take care of sending these to Indonmesia back again.