The library, the catalogue, the broker: Brokering access to information in the hybrid library

Abstract

In his chapter on libraries and librarians in A history of reading, Alberto Manguel calls librarians ‘ordainers of the universe’, an epithet used, he tells us, by the Sumerians. He discusses the efforts of Callimachus to ordain the order of books at The Library of Alexandria and notes that ‘With Callimachus, the library became an organised reading‐space’. (1) These phrases are useful handles on which to hang a view of what it is libraries do. Libraries may no longer aim to collect and classify all documented knowledge,, but their selection and acquisition policies have ‘ordained’ the view of knowledge and learning their readers have had, as well as which materials have become a part of the intellectual record libraries jointly create with archives, museums and others. The library has further organised these materials in ways that are useful to their users; it is not merely an unordered aggregation. In this paper I want to explore some aspects of this organisation in a new environment. What ‘organised reading‐spaces’ will libraries create in a network society?