robertogreco

I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free. —Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me)

ON LIBRARIESI was visiting public libraries and ultimately writing my dissertation about them and realizing it’s not about people engaging with kind of romanticized documents. There is some of that in the library, but it’s also compromised bodies interacting with compromised bodies, often the most marginalized people in societies and also really be... See more

They are spaces of intergenerational learning, they’re spaces of kind of civic engagement. And also where other social services fall short because of neglect and underfunding. Public libraries often have to pick up the slack there. That’s not something we’re typically going to ask an archive to do. So just the fact that there is so much that they’r... See more

But what Joan is calling for is this notion that the more you get close to how human beings are relating and how human beings are understanding, the harder it is to replace all of that with a fancy algorithm. And one thing about librarians is they know their local context and they understand the different constituencies that are involved. All of th... See more

A spirit of enlightenment, joy, curiosity, wonder. A sense of kinship with the others. To me, libraries have always functioned as lighthouses – living, breathing monuments to the light of human consciousness. They are places that lost and weary souls can go to in search of relief. Public libraries are one of the things that civilization got really,... See more