Thin is welfare...: notes on public libraries

Abstract

This paper focuses on the essential role of libraries as providers of cultural welfare within local societies. The pandemic storm, with its consequences of lockdown, audience’s limitations, new social distances and barriers is underlying the loss of many social functions that in the last years appeared completely obvious and natural for libraries.

Some of this services and functions in the next future probably will be re-designed relying on more developed digital technologies, but for the large part of social functions there is no alternative in taking place inside a physical and material space, built to welcome people, to offer the best condition for cultural and intercultural dialogue, to protect and nurture societal networks.

Also the use of the library’s rooms as an oasis for students, a place in which studying and reading without using the other services – in some way, not a central function for the library – is a precious opportunity to overcome the inadequacy of private homes to host work and learning activities, especially in stress conditions, due to the superposition of smart working and digital classes in the same family and in the same space.

In the same time, the function of welcoming local people, offering a high-quality shelter for the most fragile audiences and all the services devoted to the empowerment for new citizens and immigrants suffers for severe cuts; we can perceive clearly the first dangerous effects, but major impacts will be soon evident in the next future.

In this condition finding new ways to recover the relations with local audiences, sewing up endangered networks, developing a new dialogue with local society is not an over-structural exigency, but something that largely exceed the strict cultural domain; also if all this involves rethinking from the scratch developed and consolidated models.

It’s a need, impossible to avoid and of great urgency, if we don’t want to pay social costs of still invaluable magnitude.