Library as a Place: A Return to the Museion

Abstract

Sharing their origins, i.e., coming from the ancient Museion, library and museum are intertwined in their essence. These spaces, which strive to gather all the knowledge of the world in one place, represent places of learning, and exchange of knowledge, but also of contemplation. Due to the development of technology and digital spaces of memory at the end of the twentieth century, many authors in various fields of humanities and social sciences wrote about overcoming the need for physical places to store information and the potential of the vast spaces of the Web that will finally gather all the knowledge of the world at one spot. However, studies at the beginning of the 21st century, especially those conducted after the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the suggested physical isolation, point to the necessity of meeting places in communities. In this paper, the importance of a library as a place is pointed out – a space that, although adapted to the needs of society in the 21st century, still essentially represents a Museion. Therefore, in the first part of the paper, the origin of the term and the idea of Museion is explained, while the second segment discusses the dialectics between the potentials of digital spaces for the preservation of information and the values of physical spaces of a library. The next part of the paper stresses the importance of a library as a participative place for the community, while the following one turns to the idea of these places as particular heterotopias, spaces for contemplation and creative incubators.