The library heritage’s enhancement between public engagement and public history

Abstract

Libraries, through services, activities, professionals and citizens, can be made active places of the dialectic between politics and history, memory and history, local reality and global reality, institutional and personal experience, and past and present, thus educating the society to history and citizenship. A fruitful way is to study and enhance the cultural heritage that the libraries own and the one they have access to, deconstructing it, redefining it and redistributing it in new forms; in this regard, it may be useful to rely on practices and opportunities concerning a public engagement and derived from the disciplinary and civil context of public history.