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.<\/strong><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
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 \u201cthird places\u201d1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - \u201cIn the early 1980s, Ray Oldenburg, professor emeritus of urban sociology at the University of Pensacola in Florida, conceived of the \u2018third place,\u2019 which he distinguished from the \u2018first place,\u2019 the home, and the \u2018second place,\u2019 the workplace. The third place is a complementary space devoted to the community\u2019s social life and refers to places where individuals may meet and have informal exchanges.\u201d Mathilde Servet, \u201cLes biblioth\u00e8ques troisi\u00e8me lieu: Une nouvelle g\u00e9n\u00e9ration d\u2019\u00e9tablissements culturels,\u201d Bulletin des biblioth\u00e8ques de France<\/em>, no. 4 (July 2010): 57\u201363, http:\/\/bit.ly\/1ukJJXT.<\/span> 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<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> -  Examples include the Occupy Wall Street movement\u2019s People\u2019s Library (https:\/\/peopleslibrary.wordpress.com\/) and the Nuit Debout movement\u2019s BiblioDebout (https:\/\/biblio-debout.org).<\/span> Thus artistic interventions around the theme of the library are inscribed within a world bursting with interactions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Although this thematic section originated with an invitation to examine both the idea of the library and the new forms of digital archives and big data, it seems that many authors and artists are drawn, rather, to the \u201ctraditional\u201d library and its book collections. These are not nostalgic approaches aimed simply at deploring the death of the printed book, but expressions of a desire to explore, among other things, the unifying potential of the library as an agent of mediation, a social space, or a performance space. The book itself is considered as much for its relational power as for its role in the transmission of knowledge. A number of the artists featured in this issue, in fact, have assumed the role of librarian or archivist by producing works or formulating classification systems that provoke reflections on the value granted to books and the consequences of certain choices on what will become official knowledge. Remember that the content of a library is based on a collection formed through a series of selections and rejections. While new books are published, the obligation arises to slough off some older or \u201cless pertinent\u201d ones; the effect is to influence the construction of cultural memory. As Zs\u00f3fia Bene and Olindo Caso note, \u201cThe scope and mechanisms of a library\u2019s mission and programming cannot be dissociated from the current ideological context.\u201d These abandoned, forgotten, or discarded books\u200a\u2014\u200aas well as those that, to the contrary, have resisted the passage of time by continuing to feed the collective imagination\u200a\u2014\u200aprovide the underlying motivations for the practices highlighted in these pages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All of the essays and portfolios in this thematic section feature books, archives, and collections (of words, texts, and even water!). The projects, infiltrating practices, personal libraries, and book-like works presented here are an invitation to rediscover and read books forgotten in the stacks of libraries. \u201cThe death of reading has been as pervasive a fear as the death of the book,\u201d Paulina Mickiewicz emphasizes. Thus, reinventing the library of today and tomorrow brings reading back to its proper place, at least for a time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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