Yesterday I visited Biblioteca Cordoba, a public library in the middle of the city, funded by the province of Cordoba. It’s a beautiful building inside and out. Unfortunately, when you enter, it’s simply a large room, with a dozen tables, one computer for a catalogue search (DOS) and one card catalogue. There are doors all around the room, behind which hide employees, books (closed stacks), meeting rooms for staff, etc. What’s more discouraging is the process for getting a library card. Like in some North American public libraries, you have to bring ID and proof of residence (utility bill). But you also have to have what they call a “warrantor”. This is someone, 21 years of age or older, with ID, proof of residence (a utility bill), and the warrantor’s last pay stub. They want to make sure that if you loose/destroy a book, someone will be able to pay for it, if you can’t.
Fortunately, this restrictive concept of “public library” is somewhat compensated by what are called popular libraries. Popular libraries, if I understood correctly, are created by interested people that wish to see a library in their community. Funding comes from many sources, from membership fees to Federal Government support (CONABIP). Some popular libraries are in indigent communities (favelas) and are usually created to promote literacy among children. Here are links to some of these libraries (obviously the richest, since they have websites) but there are many more that exist. In Cordoba province, there are at least 200.
October 14th, 2005 at 4:47 pm
The “popular libraries” (bibliotecas populares) are a model implemented just in Argentina (in the rest of the continent, they are just “public libraries”). The popular model was intended to become an independent model, i.e., not depending of the Government funding. But, with the time and the economic crisis, the popular model has become almost a public one, as the main funding source for this kind of libraries come from CONABIP. However, their main goal is to be a community library, and, most of the times, they are the fruit of a grass-root development project. In rural areas, where provincial / municipe government often forget the cultural / intellectual needs of the population, popular libraries supply basic information for people. But there is a lot of work to do. These little libraries need money, need books, and need real librarians: they cannot hire professionals (and I think that just a few librarians would like to work in thiese places) so they have to use local human resources (sometimes they are good, sometimes they aren´t).
Popular libraries are a good idea. But Argentinians are not aware of the importance of this kind of institution, so they don´t support them. Librarians try to get a good job in big, academic libraries, and they forget the need of professionals in inner Argentina: mountains, fields, rain forest, deserts, places qhere a lot of people still don´t know how to write their names (and, of course, they don´t know whom they must vote, which are their rights, or how to heal a wound or a diarrhea).
Greetings from this lovely (and wounded) country
E.C.