The identity of the contemporary public library

AA.VV., Maurizio Vivarelli, Margarita Perez Pulido

• Editore: Ledizioni
• Anno: 2016
• ISBN:
  9788867054909
• Argomento: Lingue e linguistica
• Categoria: Scienze dell'informazione e biblioteconomia

The volume deals with some of the most relevant issues related to the identity of the public library and its historical, cultural, social, organizational changes, according to a comparative perspective. The topics are covered in four sections (History, Present and Future of the Public Library; Models of Analysis, Measurement, Evaluation; Complexity Challenges; Work in Progress), thus providing a wide overview of the present and the future of an institution paramount in improving people's lives.

The Identity of the Contemporary Public Library. Theories for a Holistic Perspective of Interpretation

Maurizio Vivarelli*

Library is a growing organism

S.R. Ranganathan, 1931

1. Points of view. Public library and its identity

One of the most debated topics in the last years, is no doubt the analysis of the many factors changing the identity of the contemporary public library, from its conceptual model to its architectural shape, from its documentary features to organising and managing procedures, analysed from the different points of view that can be assumed in the general scope of library science1. Hence this implies the definition and adoption of tools to evaluate and interpret the new contexts which are beginning to be outlined, and that entail the production and communication of information and knowledge, the nature of collections, the cognitive profiles of users and their styles of use, the new anthropological fields which must be taken into account so as to envisage, conceive and manage public libraries firmly rooted in their cultural, social and documentary environment. The radical nature of the ongoing transformations, however, makes the task library science is forced to take on really difficult and problematic,
and this also implies the fact, at least obvious to the writer, that interdisciplinarity will become the necessary road we must take with true conviction, leaving all rhetoric behind. If one were to slightly simplify this argument one could state that, until not long ago, the quantitative import of the various service indicators was believed to be, on its own, a criterion one could base library assessment on, whose «effectiveness», whose ability to reach the goals set, was the clear, explicit, shared purpose to pursue, and on which the level of social legitimacy the library itself was able to achieve depended. A partial dematerialisation of the concept of collection, advancing new anthropological demands no longer based on the quality of custom services alone, a fragmentation of the models organising knowledge have raised a battery of problems, which not only regard the institutional public library as historically outlined since the first half the 19th century, but which also delve into the intimate nature of the concept of ‘library’ since its foundation in the early modern age, at least insofar as the cultural history of Europe is concerned2. Moreover, the progressive definition of these problematic fields involves not only LIS studies or, in its more general aspects, the evolution of the models of selection, management and transmission of registered knowledge. It also affects the symbolic and metaphoric nature of libraries, which in its many visual and textual ramifications is at the heart of a wide connective tissue of relationships, them too culturally and historically defined. It is interesting to note, in that respect, that also in a recent film directed by Christopher Nolan (Interstellar, 2014), the library plays a very prominent role: it is indeed the communication surface of a small home library which is the place for contact and mediation with the complex space-time environment the lead character must venture in (Fig. 1). This simple and ultimately obvious realisation, however, further and significantly confirms how vital the conceptual and metaphorical dimension of a library can be, in its multifaceted dimensions, partly afferent to the limited confines of library science, and, to a much more relevant degree, to the wider and thick cultural and communicative context, that the library, since its farthest and mythical origins, certainly is no irrelevant part of.

Fig. 1 - Picture taken from Interstellar, directed by Cristopher Nolan, 2014.

Therefore, the library form takes on an important narrative role in Interstellar (but there could be many more examples), and this means that this form, in its historically and morphologically determined identities, still holds a relevant semantic and expressive potential, which is worth identifying, outlining, discussing, also exploring the heuristic possibilities of an oblique gaze, attempting to intersect the principles and methodologies rooted in the scope of library science with other imports, which would hopefully strengthen interpretative competences.

The specific purpose of this paper is to posit a string of considerations on the contemporary public library identity, on the kind of its physical and metaphorical spaces3; the object of this examination consists in its beginnings (well-rooted before the postmodern whirlwind), from the ‘public’ library in the sense scholar and librarian Luigi Crocetti (1929-2007) identified twenty years ago, i.e. a ‘general’, ‘free, ‘contemporary’ one4. The perspective here proposed basically intends to observe the library from the inside, analysing, in general, all the traces of the different phenomena taking place within the uncertain boundaries of its space. With the expression ‘library space’, we shall here refer to the architecturally defined morphology of space, to the informative and documentary aspects of such space, and to its extensions in the digital environment5. We shall therefore examine many elements of a heated national and international debate on these topics, well aware of their wide scope and complexity, which certainly make a thorough and complete discourse difficult to pursue. This is why we shall preliminarily outline the structure of this paper, and the principles and methods used. First of all, by the term ‘identity’, whose polysemy is blatant, we shall refer to the features all the subjects attribute to the library, in order to identify its role, functions and special services. Leaving the intricate philosophical and lexicographic matters charactering the concept and term in the background, we could define ‘identity’ as all the qualities pertaining to the library, which make a library, at least according to the use in the natural language, ‘identical’ to a conceptual and abstract model outlining its form. Identity, therefore, in a nutshell, indicates the «perfect equality» between two entities. Amongst the multiple meanings described in Treccani Vocabolario, for the Italian word ‘identità’, the closet ones to this linguistic use are two. The former is the one stating, about personal identity, that it consists “in being that one and not another”. Hence, identity is what is established and proved through the correspondence between the subject’s features and the elements described in a specific document, which is not coincidentally called ‘document’ or identity ‘card’. The latter, stemming from the psychological and psychoanalytical field, defines identity as “the sense and self-awareness as an entity different from the others and persistent in time”, and as “continuity of one’s self”; and when the awareness of these elements diminishes there is an “identity crisis”6. We can then affirm that the library ‘is’ something (public, social, digital, participatory etc.), and that this ‘something’ identifies, specifies, differentiates, characterises its identity, physiognomy or, daring an even more idealistic term, its essence. The qualities associated to the library originally depend on an aesthetic act; it is on the preliminary basis of a perception that we come to formulate a judgement, be it personal, social, or one elaborated within a disciplinary field; and this judgement ultimately is of a relational nature, like when we state something is identical to itself: also in this case there is a reference – i.e. a relation –, even if a circular one. For this reason, in the end, we say that the library is something, and not something else; for this reason we can state that the library in its uniqueness corresponds to its prototype; finally, for this reason we are authorised to believe one library is identical to another. In this way, we ac...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title page
• Colophon
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction
• HISTORY, PRESENT AND FUTURE OF THE PUBLIC LIBRARY
• - The Public Library in Contemporary Society: Analytical Tools
• - The Public Library Today: State of the Art as an Ethical Organization
• - The Identity of the Contemporary Public Library. Theories for a Holistic Perspective of Interpretation
• MODELS OF ANALYSIS
• - Beyond Indicators and Measures. Understanding the User’s Reality Through a Qualitative Approach
• - Between Quantity and Quality: Big Data and the Value of Data Interpretation
• COMPLEXITY CHALLENGES
• - The Role of Libraries Between Fragmentation and Complexity of Knowledge
• - The Challenges of Public Libraries in the Digital Environment
• - A Plural Identity for the Public Library
• - Towards a Critique of the Concept of Model in Library Science
• WORK IN PROGRESS
• - Libraries in Tuscany: Some Considerations on the Early Results of a Survey
• - Public Libraries in the Social Accountability of Local Administrations
• APPENDIX
• - About the Contemporary Public Library. A Short Selective Bibliography