From the Written Memory to Social Space

The democratization of libraries, begun during the Enlightenment, flourished in the twentieth century when public libraries came into existence. Far from being implicitly reserved for a bourgeois or intellectual elite, these facilities have become sites of convergence for increasingly diversified publics.

In fact, for the past twenty years, the spread of digital media and devices providing access to the Internet, with its proliferation of available books and archival documents, has forced yet another reconsideration of the role of libraries as physical spaces. Can we still conceive of the library as an institution for the deposit and preservation of written memory? Aware of the need to adapt quickly to this change of paradigm, most public libraries have paid particular attention to developing “third places”¹ 1 - “In the early 1980s, Ray Oldenburg, professor emeritus of urban sociology at the University of Pensacola in Florida, conceived of the ‘third place,’ which he distinguished from the ‘first place,’ the home, and the ‘second place,’ the workplace. The third place is a complementary space devoted to the community’s social life and refers to places where individuals may meet and have informal exchanges.” Mathilde Servet, “Les bibliothèques troisième lieu: Une nouvelle génération d’établissements culturels,” Bulletin des bibliothèques de France, no. 4 (July 2010): 57–63, http://bit.ly/1ukJJXT. that enhance user experience (fab labs, or digital fabrication workshops, are a good example of this). At the same time, citizens themselves have contributed to different forms of democratization of knowledge by circulating books through a wide variety of participatory library projects and ephemeral libraries based on the notion of exchange and sharing.² 2 -  Examples include the Occupy Wall Street movement’s People’s Library (https://peopleslibrary.wordpress.com/) and the Nuit Debout movement’s BiblioDebout (https://biblio-debout.org). Thus artistic interventions around the theme of the library are inscribed within a world bursting with interactions.