Here is my attempt at a paper on Library: An Unquiet History.
Although I liked this book very much (it completely changed my view on libraries) I found it hard to actually get a paper out of it.
In Library: An Unquiet History, Matthew Battles writes, "[The library is] a world, complete and uncompletable, and it is filled with secrets (p. 5)." In fact, the
Library and the book seem to be barometers for societal, political and cultural upheaval
for civilizations throughout history. From Mesoamerica to Alexandria, China, Europe,
the Middle East, and Rome, each civilization had its own flourishing book culture,
and its own biblioclasms to match. Libraries capture the views of the most powerful people of society.
Libraries have existed for religion, for the people and for power. For example, in Renaissance Florence, "Big libraries didn't spring up because of the economy and efficiency of the printing press...they were bound up in the appetites of dukes, and merchants, and popes for the new learning adorning in Renaissance. For despite the challenges of the free press, the control of massed knowledge offered a new basis for their power (p. 72)." Libraries have always and will always be this way. While many see the library as an innocuous part of society, they are instead great tools for the powerful to minister over the masses. What better place to put your ideas than into the shelves of libraries? The Romans did it, and even the library at the Vatican did it. In fact, in the sixteenth century Vatican library, "The humanist fascination with antiquity had developed from the subversive fancy of academics into an influential tool of authority.... In this sense, the library, which felt the pangs of change as books increased in number and kind, became a battleground of contesting ideologies (p. 82)."
Philosophers and academics have battled through the centuries over which ideologies and which type of books should be held in libraries. This battles also questions who should be allowed to patron the library. While many felt that only scholars and priests should be allowed to read the books, lest the public steal a book when checking it out, it was eventually decided that making libraries open to the public was a great way of making society into an integrated and educated whole. The great librarian of the British library Panzzi felt that, "...the humble library catalog could be more than a list, more even than a guide to knowledge: it could be the means to transform society itself (p. 131)." Both utilitarians and humanists saw the benefits of a public endowed with libraries. To the utilitarians to public library had far greater benefit than private libraries ever could, "...In a well-tended library, the utilitarians realized, each book's value to society increases as more people gain access to and use it. Unlike the private book, whose functional use ends when it is read and placed on the shelf fro the last time a library book may continue to open doors (p. 136)." To the humanists, the library offered "an escape, however momentary; which ultimately encouraged the regard for one's fellow man that is the foundation of altruism (p. 137)."
The 19th and 20th centuries were no different for libraries than the centuries
before them. The American South at the turn of the 20th century held libraries in which
African Americans were not welcomed by white society. They reflected the social
tensions of the times, and while in Europe the destruction of books harmed the people, in America "Libraries left intact [had become] tools of oppression and genocide, too, since the offer[ed] canons that reflect[ed] the conceits of mystical nationalism and the will to purify (p. 180)." In World War II, and in Bosnia, libraries were used as targets. The buildings and books were both burned in catastrophic events that exposed a war on culture as well as people. The destruction of books nearly paralleled the destruction of human lives, yet in some places glimmers of hope remained. In the Vilna Ghetto, Herman Kruk was allowed to reside over a small library. His books were a measure of how many towns had been raided and how many Jews had been killed or hauled to concentration camps. His little library was a place of sorrow, yet it was also a place where prisoners could go for an escape. He wrote, 'It was established that a hungry person reads eagerly about hunger, whole someone with a full stomach cannot abide that kind of subject matter (p. 179).’
It was in these and many other ways that the Library mirrors the ideologies of various epochs. As Battles pointed out, the digital age will change little. The books, though digital, will still be sacred objects that can be used for ill or good