Processing: Library Lineages

Matthew Battles’ sweeping history of the library, which in turn is also the history of the organization and consumption of knowledge, provides a fascinating survey of the roles libraries had served as custodians of wisdom, status symbols, objects of conspicuous consumption, and, more recently, a space of gathering for purposes of community, literacy, and access to information.

As public libraries today become more and more what Mattern calls “a network of integrated, mutually reinforcing, evolving infrastructures — in particular, architectural, technological, social, epistemological and ethical infrastructures,” the university libraries seem to retain the elite, research-oriented quality that had characterized most libraries before the proliferation of mass-produced books. Big cities like NYC aside, most public libraries nowadays do not have very much scholarly literature at all, let alone access to academic databases. I can’t help but think that this university/public divide is very problematic as it makes independent scholarship without university affiliation much more difficult (and expensive), while the public libraries are being stretched thin to serve the community’s needs for baseline English as well as digital literacy.

One Reply

  • Thank you, Leila! I very much appreciate your acknowledging the divide between research and public institutions, and how lack of access to scholarly materials complicates independent scholarship. That said, InterLibrary Loan is a pretty amazing (if sometimes slow) service 🙂

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