Alexander the Great proudly declared: "The world belongs to me." One way to achieve this is to collect all the books that exist in the world. It's a pity that Alexander died before he could get out of school, and only the Iliad was by his side. Later, the legacy of this emperor was carried on by the Ptolemaic dynasty, and the library named after "Alexander" stood in the port of Egypt, facing the sea and bathing in the sun, as if enveloped by the wisdom of mankind since ancient times.
A stack of books, a collection of books into a library. Those well-known libraries have put a lot of effort into everything from venue facilities and staff training to bibliography and book collection. What kind of standards should a perfect library achieve? Along with the story of the library, there are endless events of destruction of human civilization, what lessons have they left for history, and what kind of enlightenment will they bring to the present and future librarianship?
No matter how small a library is, it can be full of love
Shaanxi Xi'an Beilin District Library, at its level, is really too small to care. However, for Yang Suqiu and Xiao Ning, who were in charge of the construction, building this library was a thing they were very concerned about.
From September 2020 to September 2021, Yang Suqiu, who taught at the university, took a temporary position in the government and participated in the construction of the district-level library from scratch, thus giving birth to the non-fiction work "Why Should There Be a Library in the World".
This is a "congenitally insufficient" library, it was originally built to cope with the upcoming inspection of urban construction, because it is a transitional library, it is located in the underground of a shopping mall, the funds are limited, it may move out at any time, the leadership does not have much expectation of it, the booksellers who are moved by the wind just want to take the opportunity to cram in all kinds of lucrative bestsellers or unsold books, the two library directors seem to be able to do this smoothly and effortlessly as long as they do things "routinely".
However, they are all "nonsense and showy" people, or in other words, Yang Suqiu and Xiao Ning are both women with abundant maternal love, they can't let the things they like slide into an uncontrollable situation, and they can't let themselves deal with public affairs such as building a library, because of the little love in their hearts, because of the sense of responsibility in their work, they hope to do this thing as well as possible within the scope of their ability.
How to prevent fireproof, waterproof, oily and leakage of the wall, how to attract the attention of passers-by with a library sign that is not bright and atmospheric enough, how to take into account the various needs of different readers, especially the safety of facilities in the children's area, the color of the walls, the arrangement of tables and chairs, etc., are all small things, but everything costs money, and the funds are so limited, the two inexperienced people need to face the ensuing troubles, such as forgotten interface locations, unqualified construction rework, and unexpected additional expenses such as greenery and ornaments...... Every penny has to be used on the knife edge.
The biggest headache is the type of books that need to be purchased. The battle of wits with the booksellers is the best part of the book. It is understandable for businessmen to make profits, but the key is to see whether the gatekeepers have the level, whether they can see through it, and whether they can resist the attack of "sugar-coated shells". Yang Suqiu is a doctor, a humanities scholar, with rich reading experience, she saw through the tricks played by booksellers, so she took charge to complete the compilation of bibliographic procurement, which is a very laborious thing, and she needs to overcome the contradiction between personal interest, knowledge structure and "public selection", she consulted her teachers and friends, and also openly consulted netizens, gathered the strength of everyone, and completed this crucial link for the preparation of the library.
There are senior intellectuals with rich professional knowledge, dads who love martial arts, middle school students who love Haruki Murakami, and high school teachers who hope that they can read poetry as a "subject writer...... Every voice comes from all directions, and these pure and passionate voices cannot be fully accepted, which is the duty of the "public reader". One of the library's commitments is that it is open to all. They even took into account the needs of people with disabilities and found ways to collect Braille books. When I read this, I was very moved. My brother is also blind. Blind people also have the need to read and listen to books, as well as the requirements for knowledge, entertainment, and quality of life, Braille books help them complete their studies, and literary works add a different color to their black and white world.
We often say that reading is a private matter, but Yang Suqiu, through the construction of a library, through "defending the bibliography", shows how reading can become a public affair and how to maximize public benefits. The book is very unpretentious and very moving. It is not a hymn to ideals, but rather a story about the small changes and small reservations that people make in the struggle of reality. Isn't what human beings are good at finding ways to achieve a breakthrough in a difficult situation? The achievement of each of these goals is like the construction of a ladder that slowly lifts the path of human development. Libraries are such goals.
From a material and technical point of view, let's talk about the construction of libraries
After all, the Beilin District Library is only a district-level library, and in the history of human civilization, the problems faced by building a large-scale library are obviously much more numerous and more difficult to deal with.
John Willis Clarke's book, The Art of Bibliophilia, is a book on the history of libraries in Europe, which provides a deeper understanding of the technical requirements required to build a library.
The book begins with the royal palace archives of the kings of Nineveh, followed by Polycrates, the ruler of Samos, and Pisistratus, the ruler of Athens, among others, and the earliest book repositories are all associated with temples or palaces. The clergy of all civilized nations belonged to the literate class, and the monarchs financed the arts and literature. These are small private collections, and the habit of reading is developing, but not yet firmly established. By the time of Aristotle, the situation had changed. Aristotle's codification practice set a model for the magnificent Library of Alexandria.
Books were long in the hands of the elite, who were preceded by emperors and aristocrats, and in the Middle Ages it was mainly a monastic community. In medieval public libraries, there was a strict set of rules for the production and preservation of books. At that time, the collection was not very large, and could have been accommodated by one or more shelves in the cloister, or placed in a cabinet in a small room, after all, the collection was mainly for ceremonial purposes. The library corner in the monastery gradually expanded, occupying one corner after another with favorable terrain. Driven by this mentality, independent libraries seeking the status of book collecting have gradually become a climate, and the college library has also flourished under the wave of book collection. For many old colleges, building a library was a later idea. Merton College at the University of Oxford and Pembroke College at the University of Cambridge were all established about a hundred years after the establishment of the university, and they belonged to the same period of time as the abbey library, and the interior furnishings of the college library and the abbey library were exactly the same, which shows the inheritance relationship between the two.
The architectural layout and institutional construction of the library have been basically formed, and the next step is how to improve it. The book presents the arrangement of the library's desks, reading desks, cubicle installations, bookcases, bookshelves, etc., including some inconspicuous small things, such as book chains. Each library has a special chain of books, in different forms, "The Art of Collecting Books" has more than a dozen images of the chain, and a detailed explanation of the structure and craftsmanship is made. What they all have in common is to prevent books from being taken away. In the Middle Ages, books were very expensive objects, and it was not until the invention of printing that the guardian duty that had been performed by a special group was handed over to the whole world.
The work is rich and informative. The content of the author's investigation and research, including the location, scale, layout, furnishings, table of contents of the room where the books are stored, and the progress and development of other protective and convenient utensils, the text explanation goes deep into the decomposition of the specific operation procedures, the whole book is equipped with a large number of architectural plans, old photos of the interior configuration of the library, and various reading scenes found in other books, etc., these pictures are not only numerous, but also some details are sometimes brought out separately, which complements the text and enhances the documentary value of the book.
The vanishing library, the endless embers
Mankind has built many great libraries. However, the number of libraries that have disappeared is almost as large as the number of libraries that have been built. In its unique way, the library has witnessed the vicissitudes of history and the changes of the times.
The work "Disappearing Library" by Ye Jinhong, the founder of the "Traveler's House" bookstore, tells us about the process of these libraries from their establishment, development to their final disappearance, such as the Swedish University Library in the 17th century, the chronicle of the two fires in the London Library, the two disasters of the Leuven University Library, the bombing of the Oriental Library, the book encounter in the Spanish Civil War, the German library in World War II, the Paris Library in World War II, the Feng Pingshan Library, and the Florentine Library.
In the 17th century, the Swedish army looted a large number of works of art, books and archives from Poland, Germany and other countries, but in just 100 years, a fire destroyed two-thirds of the treasure. How ironic! How many such tribulations have been experienced in the history of human civilization if they want to rely on force and power to shape the culture of a country.
The ecology of the library is very fragile, and any natural disaster will bring great danger to it, not to mention the man-made destruction, in the years of fire, every library has become a living target.
The cannonballs are coming, the library is there, and there is no way to avoid it. In some cases, famous libraries were the intended targets of bombing. On January 29, 1932, the Japanese invaders raided Shanghai and dropped bombs on the area where the Commercial Press was located, destroying all its printing houses, compilation offices, Oriental libraries and other facilities. It was reported: "The Hanfen Building in the Oriental Library, along with all the rare books in its collection, was robbed, and its loss was beyond the calculation of money, and it was indeed a great catastrophe in the history of world culture." ”
Library of London, KU Leuven Library, St. Paul's Library, Royal Library of Saxony, Bavarian National Library...... They were all destroyed by artillery fire. Some library buildings have been preserved but their collections have been looted, such as the Russian Library in Turgenev. Efforts were made to evacuate the museum's collections to escape the fighting, but they were either shipwrecked on the way or scattered.
The destruction of books is not limited to the area of the library. During the Spanish Civil War, after the Nazis came to power in the 30s of the 20th century, book burning incidents continued to occur, and the fear of books was like a plague in people's hearts. Those "clumsy and poisonous" books were destroyed in a centralized manner, and a large number of literate people were brutally persecuted. "Wherever someone sets fire to a book, someone will end up setting fire to someone. "This history of the suffering of knowledge is extremely painful.
Fortunately, there are still many book lovers. Maria Molinaire continued to take on the role of "educational missionary" in exile, and Rogris-Monino and his colleagues continued to cover, collect, and rescue the books that had been lost. After the destruction of the Oriental Library, the Commercial Press quickly cleaned up the mess and marked the words "the first time after the national disaster" on the copyright pages of the books reprinted after the resumption of business, resisting Japanese coercion and reminding people to remember history. In the decade before and after the fall of Hong Kong, Mr. Chen Junbao, the director of the Fung Ping Shan Library, stayed at his post, sending his wife and children away and leaving him alone in Hong Kong, where he was detained by the Japanese army and subjected to harsh interrogation. With their fearless courage and noble qualities, these beacon fire keepers have saved countless cultural heritages.
The past is vivid. Libraries may disappear and books may be destroyed, but what will never disappear or be destroyed is the human yearning for knowledge. The purpose of Yip's writing is also to remind public opinion that the professional field and local governments recognize the immeasurable value of library and archive collections, and to introduce a comprehensive cultural protection policy, and to call for world peace through the efforts of front-line professional librarians and archivists to protect the "memory of the world".
The significance of digital processing of libraries
In many cases, there is no way to prevent a disaster for libraries. The arson incident at the Los Angeles Library on April 30, 1986 and the underground water pipe burst at the Boston Public Library on August 16, 1998 were both catastrophic disasters in the history of public libraries.
Nicholas S. A. Basbane's "The Eternal Library" is a work that uses these two events to discuss the value of public libraries.
"Perseverance" and "fortitude" are the names of the two stone lions in front of the New York Public Library. For more than ten years, Bas Bain has visited the world's major public libraries and university libraries: Boston Public Library, New York Public Library, Harvard University Library, Bodleian Library of Oxford University, etc., showing us the work done by countless bibliophiles, booksellers and librarians with "perseverance" and "fortitude" in preserving the inheritance of book culture.
This book is different from historical works such as "The Art of Book Collection", and the author's focus is more on the current situation of contemporary public libraries and the development trend of libraries in the future, as well as the practical work and opinions and ideas of public discussion in terms of management, protection, and memory storage.
Every library has a finite amount of physical space, so what should be stored or replaced regularly? Are we aware that cultural memory is actually chosen, what is filtered and fortunately preserved? We must understand that the library is a social construct that is only one of the ways to preserve as much of the memory as possible. Human civilization is vast and rich, but at the same time barren and poor. According to the rule of forgetting, some of the objects contained in the library are often buried in the depths of time, and proper preservation does not mean that they are useful, they are locked layer by layer, and they have no connection with ordinary people. There are also some seemingly useless, but only after suffering great destruction do people begin to pay attention to and cherish it.
These two library catastrophes drew public attention to the existence of freeze-drying technology and "disaster recovery service companies", which were also part of the normal functioning of large libraries. The library is an extremely complex machine, a device sustained by the rotation of countless gears. The operation of the library has a set of procedures that require the cooperation of staff. The sheer volume of books must be effectively managed and dispatched. One of the contradictions of libraries, especially public libraries, is precisely the "cherishing" of books. At a certain stage of information development, what needs to be preserved and what can be discarded? This is a great test for managers.
We are still accustomed to using the library as a repository for paper books, but the authors of The Eternal Library emphasize the significance of digitization, and that some books have entered the end of their life "gradual decay", and people need to deal with the transformation of the electronic form of the text into the manuscript or printed form of the original record, and the destruction of the material form may mean the subsequent demise of historical characteristics. The study of the problems related to the digital preservation of books is not only the problem of digital copying, but also how to formulate a reasonable "archival strategy", and the future librarians will focus on serving as "guides", "agents of information dissemination", and "gatekeepers" with "value-added" skills, so as to provide better, more and more convenient ways for public reading.
Our books have undergone several technological revolutions since humans learned to write, and so have libraries as the carriers of books. Amberto Eco said, "Don't get rid of books", books can die, books live forever. The library is similar, it doesn't have to be a room full of books, it can also exist in a roll of film, a computer, a cell phone, or many other ways. As long as the sun rises as usual, and as long as the earth continues to function, the desire of mankind to gain oneself through the pursuit of learning will always be alive.
Libraries are the best part of the human ideal: a yearning for knowledge, openness, a space where all people can live together peacefully...... The library brings together the essence of human civilization. The boundaries between countries and the differences between people are clearly present in the text and are constantly dissolved. The library, on the other hand, is a spiritual home that we can all share.