Helsinki’s Oodi Library was inaugurated in 2018 and welcomed as the library of the future by the world’s media. Designed by the ALA architects’ studio, it’s a striking building that houses one of those multimedia libraries that have come to be seen, across the five continents, as the best response to the question that agitates politicians in charge of culture: how to keep citizens coming back to shared, public book spaces?
Although it possesses a collection of one hundred thousand books and offers areas for silent reading, the Oodi puts a greater emphasis on its training, conversing, and meeting areas: the cafeteria, projection room, family space, restaurant, and lecture theatres and spaces of various sizes intended for informal encounters. Its prime attraction is the Citizens’ Balcony, a large terrace with tables and chairs and spectacular views of the city.
All those features of Helsinki’s Central Library were decided on democratically. As was the name, which means “ode.” Even the budget is allocated on a participatory basis.
But none of that would have resulted in a global news story if the new library hadn’t also been in Finland and weren’t incredibly iconic. Because Nordic countries are synonymous—even in these times of deportations and institutional xenophobia—with social and pedagogical innovation, and the building housing this vanguard concept is beautiful and photogenic.
Like lists of the world’s best bookshops, lists of libraries tend to mistake the spectacular for the excellent. Money can buy physical architecture, but it is harder to buy a structure of feeling. The best libraries in the world might not be housed in stunning buildings, have 3-D printers, or appear on the TV news, but they undoubtedly fulfil a purpose in their communities comparable to or better than these Nordic libraries. It is no accident that the clearest examples of this kind of institution are found in the Global South and are always less visible than in the Global North, even though they are projects that use reading, study, and art to fight discrimination, violence, and poverty.
Colombia’s Mobile Public Library network—dubbed Mobile Libraries for Peace—uses modular structures that combine shelves filled with books and technological devices with reading and educational spaces. Twenty mobile libraries established in key parts of the country to encourage literacy as well as reconciliation for communities particularly fractured by civil war.
The National Library of Colombia’s project, led by Director Consuelo Gaitán, adapts Philippe Starck’s Libraries without Borders initiative to local needs. A secret intention of these hypermodern creations—described by their inventor as educational modules and mobile, pop-up multimedia centres—is to stimulate artistic ingenuity. In the rural municipality of Gallo, in Colombia’s north, “peace librarian” Víctor Solís Camacho established two initiatives, the “literary canoe” and the “travelling mule library” (muloteca), which bring books, games, technology, and craft materials to vulnerable, post-conflict communities. Statistics show that literacy rates increase and crime rates and conflict decrease in areas with mobile libraries; adults have a safe place to converse and children to imagine futures, like going to university, that until very recently were completely denied to them.
In Honduras we can also find a model that is the opposite to emblematic buildings with a budget of millions. Thanks to children’s library projects in the province of Lempira, initiated by the girl-centred Non-Governmental Organization Plan International, two hundred travelling backpacks are currently in circulation, which come from twenty-three school libraries and two public libraries that have revolutionized childhood by enabling kids to read stories systematically and create stories of their own. Reading and writing are also forms of what we call “empowerment.”
The experiment has been so successful and so many pupils have found alternatives to violence or failure at school that in 2019 the Honduras National Congress debated a proposal that would replicate the experiment across the country. Meanwhile in Lempira five new libraries are being built and another ten have been approved. Because a library or travelling backpack are both invitations to read, and also stages for theatre, dance, puppets, mime and spoken word. They stimulate individual development and collective action.
Finland has the money, political will, and social dynamics that allow them to realize fantastic projects like Oodi. But that shouldn’t eclipse the existence of another kind of project, more grass-roots and localized, that has to overcome lots of hurdles to achieve similar success.
In La biblioteca fantasma (“The Phantom Library”), a detailed, journalistic account of the systematic looting of the National Library of Peru over far too long a period, David Hidalgo analyzes one of the obstacles to this sort of project: corruption. It also offers a valuable profile of its excellent director, Ramón Mujica, who lost a quixotic battle to unmask the perpetrators and recover the stolen books.
In the course of singling out this bookish hero for praise, Hidalgo, investigative reporter and director of the online Peruvian newspaper OjoPúblico, reminds us of an indispensable truth: libraries are people, not buildings. From Alexandria onwards, libraries have no meaning without the commitment of each and every one of us—the turn of this century has seen some become dynamic performance stages. And they need more commitment now than ever.
In Lempira, children write reviews of the hundreds of books they read, and proudly display lists of the latter. Last year they published a book—edited by poets Salvador Madrid and Albany Flores—entitled El árbol de los libros (The Book Tree). Several of the stories are about reading and books. One is called “Superreader” and is signed by eleven-year-old Ariani Alcántara. It ends on this note: “only read to be happy.”