Is there still room for libraries in today’s digital world?

Since record keeping was invented, libraries and archives have been a crucial technology for human civilization. In the ancient Babylonian city of Nippur, rooms filled with clay tablets were found in a temple dating to five thousand years ago. The Royal Library of Ebla, in what is today modern Syria, is a bit younger, only 4000 years old, and the clay tablets found there were stored on shelves arranged by subject. 

“The schools of Plato and of the Epicureans did possess libraries, the influence of which lasted for many centuries. But the most famous collection was that of the Peripatetic School, founded by Aristotle and systematically organised by him with the intention of facilitating scientific research.”

A wealth of knowledge

For millennia, libraries served as a status symbol, allowing rich and ambitious individuals to show off their wealth and power. But they were also a means to preserve and develop knowledge, some of which was preserved by tens of generations of volunteers. The Tombuktu manuscripts, for instance, were tended to and preserved in secret by private families under the French colonial rule after the decline of the Mali empire. These books were written in Arabic and a number of African languages and provide an exceptional glimpse into the knowledge amassed in this West African city – and some of them are fully digitised now.

In the couple of thousand years since our early examples, libraries and archives have specialized for different functions: some focus on record keeping, some face more toward communities, and the public library movement has been working to make culture and learning accessible to everyone. In the seventeenth century, academic and parochial libraries started to transform, and new lending libraries appeared. 

Turning toward the public

One of the first modern public libraries in Europe was built by two Roman Catholic bishops, the Zaluski brothers, in Warsaw, Poland. Later, Katherine the not-so-great had the collection looted and brought to her in St. Petersburg, where it formed the basis of the new Imperial Public Library. Some of the collection was repatriated by the Soviet Union in the nineteen-twenties, only to be later deliberately destroyed by the Nazis.

Libraries have played a crucial role in the reformation movements, in many human rights campaigns, and, interestingly, in the temperance movement. In the 1930s, working-class advocate Francis Place and Sheffield’s member of Parliament agreed that “the establishment of parish libraries and district reading rooms and popular lectures on subjects both entertaining and instructive to the community might draw off a number of those who now frequent public houses for the sole enjoyment they afford”.

The Public Libraries Act of eighteen-fifty allowed municipalities to establish their own respective public libraries. Social Democrats also picked up on this idea and saw public libraries as a means to democratize the means of production, and as tools for the liberation of the masses. 

Information technology

But libraries also had a hand in inventing the hypertext, and ultimately, the internet as we know it today. With their intricate systems of citations and interlibrary lending, they formed information technologies that ultimately resulted in the World Wide Web. And they also championed closing the digital gap and providing internet use to the masses at a time when personal computers and home internet connections were a rare luxury.

They also lead the charge  in digitizing massive archives and making a lot of our global cultural heritage more available than ever before. And specifically because of this great technological change, libraries are transforming once again: the digital space has taken over a big part of the knowledge transfer, and libraries and archives are evolving with it. 

Public libraries are doubling down on their community functions and engaging young people from their earliest stages of literary education, while archives and research libraries help with sources and data processing. Some are experimenting with the idea of a library economy, or the so-called library of things – that is, all kinds of things, tools and resources well beyond books and media. 

Probably the most notorious experimenter is the Oodi Helsinki Public Library, where a café takes center stage in the main reading room, and infants roam the rows, while virtual reality rooms, industrial sewing machines, 3D printers and podcast studios populate some of the lower floors, while choirs perform concerts in the canteen on the ground floor. It’s a bit of a wonderland. 

Not to be outdone, the Csorba Győző County Library in Pécs also holds and organizes community events across their many member libraries, and they even run library buses to small villages where they lend books, provide internet access and educate local users, as well as sometimes take them to the events of the closest permanent library.

We have guests from both of these institutions and a data stewardess who studies the history of libraries and teaches researchers to manage their research data. We’ll discuss how the digital age changes their profession and what libraries can offer in an age of the internet.

Guests

Ulla Leinikka is the communication manager of the Helsinki Central Library Oodi, a living meeting place in the heart of Helsinki. It is one of 38 branches in Helsinki and a part of the Helmet library network.

Monika Bargmann is a Data Stewardess at the Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies, and the first contact for researchers at 13 University departments concerning all questions related to research data management and open access in science and scholarship.

Tamás Miszler the director of the Csorba Győző Library, which oversees a great many member libraries across Baranya County in Hungary.

In partnership with Display Europe, cofunded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the Directorate‑General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.