Against the wait-and-see approach of libraries: pictures at an exhibition

Abstract

The Covid-19 epidemic period has irrevocably revealed the need for a general rethinking of behaviours, priority values, sociability, and resource allocation. Libraries and librarianship are also facing the urgency of a ‘paradigm shift’, due to the wear and tear of the ‘public library’ concept and model. This essay tries to deal with both librarianship and library crisis highlighting the accelerator role played by the pandemic. In particular, the tendency to wait and see, which in some cases has ‘infected’ the library field, is critically analysed. As if the difficult situation and global vulnerability justified a loss of essentiality of library services, a renunciation of activism, a retreat to ordinary administration. On the contrary, the ‘living-together-library’, outlined in the last part of the article, chooses the path of active and proactive intervention during the pandemic. This idea enters in the daily dimension with empathy and respect and works on the hypothesis of a politics of reading as ‘motor for change’.