In the wake of tragic events and the eventual removal of memorials—be they ephemeral by design or “permanent” markers that no longer suit contemporary needs—it often falls to librarians and archivists to make sense of the mass of papers, paraphernalia and stories that appear. Libraries being repositories of knowledge, history, and stories, it seems remiss for this oversight to exist within the field’s body of research. Every time that a memorial develops, we are presented with visceral reminders of the physicality of grief. As contemporary culture continues to become more aware and mindful of death’s presence in everyday existence, it is important to bring a wide variety of academic approaches to the study of death and grief. 

In the field of librarianship, the archive is often considered to serve as a memory space with its mission being to organize and memorialize the past and bring attention to the stories that these collections contain. One of the problems inherent in this selection process is the determination of what gets archived—which objects are deemed worth saving and by what criteria. Depending on who makes these guidelines, entire histories or groups of people can be left behind. This is true, too, of how we document the objects in our collections: the metadata we generate to facilitate findability often overlook those once seen as tangential or subsidiary.

This volume brings together 18 essays focusing on the various ways in which libraries and archives function as spaces for individual and collective grief processing, mourning, and memorialization. Addressing humanistic materials through social scientific lenses, the authors take a critical librarianship approach to transdisciplinary issues at the intersection of material culture and death studies. Exploring themes of archival silence, community archiving, and loss, these essays address a variety of cases in which the library plays a central and phenomenological role in collective experiences of death and dying. With chapters covering Covid-19, ecological concerns, child death, ethics and extinction, this collection reveals the many facets of grief and human experience that librarians encounter and incorporate into their daily work.