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David Block Retires

David has been a...
David has been a friend and colleague for most all of our respective careers.  His active involvement with Latin America started when he volunteered to serve in the Peace Corps in Bolivia. I recently read several of Vanderbilt's Peace Corps papers belonging to a psychologist who was then the director of Peace Corps selection.  He characterizes the early Peace Corps volunteers in these terms: “they are learners, are reaching-out type people, intellectually adventuresome, have a desire to serve tempered with a love of fun and adventure, idealistic but with a realistic appraisal of what they will be up against, and an appropriate modesty; they want to make a contribution to their fellow-man… and they get substantial satisfactions from association with new friends in other lands.”   Those traits, along with his PhD and scholarship on Bolivia, seem a match made in heaven for David's future career in Latin American librarianship and for his SALALM colleagues who have benefitted from all these talents.
He has been a mentor to countless “SALALMis.”   He has gently, quietly guided all of us in many ways: introducing us to his wide network of contacts and colleagues in Latin America, especially in the Andean region; sharing his expertise on book buying trips and leading LAMP preservation efforts—and who else has brought Pisco sours to those long meetings? And, all along the way, he has prodded us to try to think and act in a more cooperative and sharing way.  Besides serving as president of SALALM, and several terms on the Executive Board, he hosted the annual conference at Cornell.  More importantly, he has helped reframe the vision of his member colleagues and encouraged our organization to move in new directions.  Since we can no longer “have it all”, even at the Library of Congress or the Benson, he has led us toward increasingly collaborative collections efforts in the US, and has aided Latin American libraries in the preservation and digitization of their own archives.  A more recent personal goal involved helping the national library of Peru replace their stolen rare materials.  David is a giver, charitable, kind and smart, with a wry sense of humor and great curiosity.  He seems equally at home with (and actively seeks the opinions of) taxi drivers, rural indigenous, and urban academics.  The development of the Andean collections at Cornell and Latin American collection at the Benson reflect his wide network beyond the standard publishing world to incorporate ephemera, NGO output, organizations small and large, uncommon materials in  a wide range of resources that mirror that time and place in Latin America.  In his travels he has made many friends and colleagues both in Latin America and the US.  We will miss his leadership and expertise but hope our friendships long continue.

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