Reinventing the Library

By ALBERTO MANGUELOCT. 23, 2015

Fonte: Alberto Manguel is an Argentine-born Canadian writer, translator and editor, and the author, most recently, of “Curiosity.”

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"[...] Libraries come in countless shapes and sizes. They can be like the Library of Congress or as modest as that of the children’s concentration camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the older girls were in charge of eight volumes that had to be hidden every night so that the Nazi guards wouldn’t confiscate them. They can be built from books found in the garbage, like the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., set up in 1980 by the 24-year-old Aaron Lansky from volumes discarded by the younger generations who no longer spoke the tongue of their elders, or they can be catalogued in the mind of their exiled readers, in the hope of resurrection, like the libraries plundered by the Israeli soldiers in the occupied territories of Palestine. It is in the nature of libraries to adapt to changing circumstances and threats, and all libraries exist in constant danger of being destroyed by war, vermin, fire, water or the idiocies of bureaucracy [...]"

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/24/opinion/reinventing-the-library.html?smid=fb-nytopinion&smtyp=cur&_r=0