Dewey even use the library?

(A shorter one this week.)

Melvil Dewey was a renaissance man – OF COURSE.

The library is much more, and can be much more, than whatever associations we have thrown together from life experience. The history of the Morgan library has made me consider the future publification of other private collections – will future generations one day be able to wander through Kanye west’s library of Jetsons memorabilia (he is a superfan)? Will it be the focus of a middle school field trip, boring the students to death but exciting their parents? Will the inclusion of something pop culture related in a wealthy celebrity’s “permanent collection” be momentum enough to elevate its status from “pop art” to “fine art” or “artifact”? Does a library possess such transformative power?

It seems to me that the most inclusive way to define library spaces is just to refer to them as manufacturing, refinement, and distribution facilities for the additive commodity that is knowledge. When it comes to new technologies “changing” the role of the library, I consider that what happens inside the library as not necessarily a part of its core “mission statement” (if you will – and through exploring the history of the library we are able to deduce, in a sieve-like way, what the library stands for among its many parallel purposes and values).

Our historical readings trace how knowledge and the medium of its recording have always provided a multifunctional value to the person or people in charge. Saladin selling a library to pay for the crusades might have been a mistake in the eyes of everyone curious about the content of those documents, but that line of thinking is dangerously arrogant; the library’s evolution has taught humanity about the value of knowledge through reflections on the regret of its misappropriation, incorrect appraisal, destruction. The library has come to represent shared knowledge, the earthly scrapbook of our species, and efforts to keep libraries (and the manner in which these efforts are rolled out) are a way we measure our self-worth… and scrap books can be dark!

As role of the library changes, the professor is certainly correct, I believe, in warning that making new things does not constitute an enlargement of the global knowledge pool.

One Reply

  • Your puns, Emil! You’re killing me!

    I’m glad you pointed out the diverse ways in which value is derived and ascribed in library collections. One person’s epistemological treasure is another’s spoil of war.

    It’s also interesting that you include the *manufacturing* of knowledge within your definition of libraries. We might wonder how capitalist values either connect or distinguish libraries from other information industries, like publishing and data management companies (Equifax!).

    Thanks, Emil!

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