Preface
The Once and Future Library
By Emily Candela
Libraries are sites not only for encountering and categorising certain kinds of knowledge, but also spaces (virtual or not) for dialogue and community. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the reduction or removal of access to physical library spaces has shifted the role of libraries in many communities. Furthermore, so many networks and interactions central to thinking about the very idea of library – entire ecologies of information, communication and social life – have been dramatically altered in a short period of time. This presents us with an opportunity for re-imagining: not only what a library might be under the circumstances of the current pandemic, but also how we might rethink what the library was before COVID-19 was even a household term.
How does the definition of the library change when we move beyond its physical walls (or does it)? How might we design more equitable, sustainable, imaginative systems for creating and facilitating the sharing and creation of knowledge?
Athenaeum: The Library Re-imagined, a collaborative publication created by the MRes Communication Design Pathway at the Royal College of Art, emerges from these overarching questions. Working in dialogue with RCA library staff members Angie Applegate and Tom Cridford, students on the Pathway experimented with imaginative approaches to what the ‘expanded library’ of the pandemic era might be, and what approaches, skills and forms of imagination communication design can offer. How does the definition of the library change when we move beyond its physical walls (or does it)? How might we design more equitable, sustainable, imaginative systems for creating and facilitating the sharing and creation of knowledge?
Within this publication, it is not only the library as conventionally construed – shelves of books housed within four walls – that has been subject to reimagination by the Communication Design Pathway. The contributions in Athenaeum reflect on the act of reading, for instance, what constitutes a safe space, and what it would mean for books to ‘perform’ using 3D typography. They pilot new modes of thinking about what the library could feel like and sound like, what new opportunities for community building might emerge if we searched for books via memes rather than the Dewey Decimal System, if we encountered library collections serendipitously while walking outdoors, what a library of emotions and experiences might look like, and much more.
The word ‘athenaeum’ has been lent to many types of institutions with the collection, generation, and sharing of knowledge at their foundation, including libraries. The ancient Roman Athenaeum, however, was a school. This merging of library/school is at the centre of the Communication Design students’ publication. Together, the chapters in Athenaeum act as a kind of ‘how to’, not in the sense of a definitive set of steps for achieving a single defined outcome, but as a set of shimmering possibilities, guiding us toward someplace new.
Athenaeum, 2021