Polar Correspondence in an English City: The Scott Polar Research Institute Library

The Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) Library at the University of Cambridge holds a unique collection of polar literature. This chapter incorporates Tim Ingold’s account of knowledge generation as correspondence into a history of the SPRI Library. Ingold suggests that knowledge arises within the ontogenetic engagement of beings in correspondence; knowledge is thus dialogic and processual rather than a fixed entity. This chapter shows how SPRI, and especially the library, became a key point of contact between people, places, and artefacts across time and space by fostering a correspondence—an ongoing co-creation of beings and knowledge—crystallizing into the library’s collection of books, maps, pamphlets and grey literature, creating as it did so possibilities for future correspondence. The chapter demonstrates how this correspondence changed over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries thus far through the advent of the digital era. The SPRI Library is a hub within a loose network connected by the internet, a network that now includes members of Arctic Indigenous communities as equal collaborators. The chapter suggests that a correspondence mediated by digital technology can complement but not replace the direct engagement of people and material.