Is the Library a Leisure Centre or a “Humanistic Stronghold of the Nation”?

Abstract

The Russian Library Association (RLA) Manifesto “Library — a Humanistic Stronghold of the Nation” was adopted at the 24th RLA Annual Conference in Tula (2019). It was planned that the main ideas of this document would be included in the “Concept of the Development of Librarianship in Russia”, becoming the basis for analyzing the ways of development and transformation of the country’s libraries. Of all official documents on librarianship, the clause that “humanism is the world outlook basis of the library profession” is present only in the Code of Ethics of the Russian librarian. This is not enough. The idea of humanism as the basis of the library profession should be concretized in all documents of the branch and included in library textbooks.In Russia, the printed book firmly holds its position, and readers expect from libraries full-fledged collections. The issue of improving bibliographic literacy of users is acute.At the same time, librarian V.K. Stepanov has been trying to replace the essence of the library for the second decade. He proposes to consider it a social institution, deprived of the fund and readers, and to put unrelated tasks before librarians and material and technical base. He sees the purpose of the library in providing the cognitive and creative activity of the community served through the organization of intellectual interaction, the implementation of educational and leisure programmes, the provision of public use of the necessary space, hardware and software tools and access to information sources. From the scientific point of view, this postulate is far from the requirements of logic to the distinctive features of a scientific definition. In numerous articles V.K. Stepanov uses the same arguments, refers to the same facts, far from clarifying the actual situation of the country’s libraries. All of V.K. Stepanov’s theses have long been rejected by the library community.