Expanse ::: Labyrinth
Expanse - Libraries create active spaces of exploration and discover.
The act of the book [can be] both situation and practice, pushing it beyond the threshold of pagination into the prismatic realm of
dimensionality and movement - Anna-Sophia Springer “Reading Rooms and Reading Machines” in Fantasies of the Library
(2016, MIT Press)
Labyrinth - Libraries create intricate connections or passages of questions, images, stories, information, knowledge, and culture.
Nexus ::: Wonder
Nexus - Libraries are core sites for connections, ties, and links.
Wonder - Libraries catalyze active thinking and questioning with amazement and awe.
In the deserted room the silent
Book still journey into time. And leaves
Behind it - dawns, night-watching hours
My own life too, this quickening dream.
—from Jorge Luis Borges, “Ariosto and the Arabs”
Curiosity ::: Serendipity
Curiosity - Libraries support and create an open-ended, magical, rigorous inquisitiveness.
No matter how advance our technologies, humans remain the most essential of all Reading Rooms and Reading Machines; it is
the boundless dimension of the literate minds, senses and correlate imaginaries which surround the material repository of the
library, the book, and the computer. —Anna-Sophia Springer “Reading Rooms and Reading Machines” in Fantasies of the Library
(2016, MIT Press).
Serendipity - Libraries generate unexpected, delightful discovery.
A library’s ideal function is to be a little bit a bouquiniste’s stall, a place for trouvailles.
—Umberto Eco, “What is the Name of a Rose?”
Sanctuary ::: Freedom
Sanctuary - Libraries are first a physical space; they are also a sacred space of community and learning.
Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: and indoor public
space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.
—Zadie Smith, “Northwest London Blues” in Feel Free (2018, Penguin)
Freedom - Libraries are not just a physical space, they are an experience.
To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what
value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else
we may be bound by laws and conventions - there we have non.
Virginia Woolf, “How Should One Read a Book?” (1925).
Inquiry ::: Archive
Inquiry - Libraries are a site of investigation and exploration.
Archive - Libraries preserve both artifacts and an environment for the mind.
Story ::: Lacuna
Story - Libraries contain stories of all kinds (and shapes). Through the materials they house, libraries also tell our cultural stories.
Lacuna - Libraries cannot contain every fact, story, artifact; the gaps and the missing parts in the archive, the story, the limits of human
knowledge are acknowledged.
Every library conjures up its own ghost; every ordering sets up, in its wake, a shadow library of absences.
—Alberto Manguel “The Library as Shadow” in The Library at Night (2006, Yale UP)
