National library 200 Future vision for national libraries Marek Tamm
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772 1829), German poet and philosopher (1798): The historian is the prophet facing backwards. (Der Historiker ist ein rückwärts gekehtrer Prophet) Schlegel, Athenäum (1798) I, 2, 20: Fragment no 80.
Karl Daub (1765 1836), professor of theology at Heidelberg university (1836): The act of looking backward is, just like that of looking into the future, an act of divination; and if the prophet is well called an historian of the future, the historian is just as well called, or even better so, a prophet of the past, of the historical. C. Daub, Die Form der christlichen Dogmen- und Kirchen-Historie, Zeitschrift für spekulative Theologie, 1836.
Personal prologue I have spent in libraries about 25 000 hours of my life. This means that about three years of my life have passed in reading rooms. I have worked in about twenty libraries around the world.
Warburg Institute Library (London) 350 000 volumes accessible on open shelves
Bibliothèque de l École normale supérieure (rue d Ulm, Paris) In total, 900 000 volumes accessible mostly on open shelves.
Jean-Marie Goulemot (2006): I have spent more time reading in libraries than eating, going to cinemas or to museums, taking a vacation by the sea. ( ) And, to end these accounting enumeration, I have undoubtedly known more libraries than women. J.-M. Goulemot, L Amour des bibliothèques, Paris, Seuil, 2006, p. 19
Academic prologue
Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Matthew Battles, The Library Beyond the Book. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2014. This book s material is interlocked to material on a slew of media: a dedicated web site, a 24-minute documentary, and a playable deck of cards.
Future scenarios for the public library the Mausoleum a place to commemorate and commune the dead the Cloister a refuge for reflection, meditation and contemplation in shared solitude [Neocloister] the Database a container for information that is classified, accessible, controllable, infinitely expansible the sort of Warehouse where the proliferation of documents and stuff is rendered navigable thanks to computational supports and machine eyes [The Accumulibrary] a Material Epistemology, where collocations and consanguinities among different kinds of knowledge are proposed, experimented with and affirmed [The Programmable Library] a series of Libraries of the Here and Now untethered to collections, from Mobile Vectors to Civic Spaces (where public ties are forged and affirmed) to freestanding Reading Rooms as spontaneous, popular, insurrectionary responses to closed and controlled versions of all of the above.
Six Theses on the Future of (National) Libraries
Thesis 1: Libraries were born before books and they will survive the (decline of) books.
Robert Darnton (2018): I don t believe in jeremiads about the death of the book and the obsolescence of libraries. More books are published in print each year than the year before, and the sale of e-books has leveled off. And our libraries are crowded with readers. We have seen that at Harvard, where I directed the library system for eight years, and public librarians have witnessed it everywhere. Publishers Weekly, 11 April 2018
Umberto Eco (2012): The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved. You cannot make a spoon that is better than a spoon. ( ) The book has been thoroughly tested, and it s very hard to see how it could be improved on for its current purposes. Perhaps it will evolve in terms of components; perhaps the pages will no longer be made of paper. But it will still be the same thing.
Thesis 2: The more digital (immaterial) our life becomes, the greater value will gain the books as physical objects and the libraries as physical places.
Stolen quote (Guy Berthiaume):
Thesis 3: Libraries are increasingly not only about preserving information, but analyzing it. Libraries will become data driven centers of cultural analytics.
Stolen quote (Riaan J Rudman):
http://cudan.tlu.ee/
Thesis 4: The less we need libraries for reading books the more importance they will gain as centers of sociability.
Stolen quote (Guy Berthiaume):
Thesis 5: Libraries will become hybrid places that intermingle books and ebooks, analog and digital formats, paper and pixels.
Thesis 6: We need multiple type of public libraries. The future belongs to a great variety of libraries, many of them not yet existing.
Edward von Lõngus, LAN Party (2016) Thank you! marek.tamm@tlu.ee