What can a library do in the 21st century? FRIDAY, 16 MARCH 2018 00:00 SEE below some preliminary paragraphs of an article about libraries sn their future JS ---------------- On the occasion of the documentary "Ex libris: The New York Public Library" by Frederic Weisman, which was screened on March 10th at the 20th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival. By Eliana Chourmouziadou As a secondary school student in the distant 1970s, I was fortunate to attend a school that had a library, a scrumptious luxury for Greece at that time, as it is for today. My relationship with this library could itself be the subject of another text. Without it, then I realized it was my future. There I also acquired the kind of knowledge that is indelibly written on the hard disk of memory, unlike what I have learned in the school classes, most of which have long been forgotten. But with my graduation from high school, my contact with libraries was virtually ending. Since then, all the books I've read have been bought or, at most, borrowed from friends. While I was already familiar with the environment and use, the ability to easily access a good lending library had disappeared, and that did not change at all in the passage of time. I am even wondering if anyone in this country is accustomed to resorting to libraries for a purpose other than academic study and research. I also wonder whether this indicates, in addition to the lack of relevant cultivation, a general depreciation of the state's offer to its citizens, which we hope will correct the new National Library at SNFCC. We do not see shelves of loaded books, but faces watching the speaker, while behind them the rotating door of the entrance turns every so often and the pitch of voices and voices dissipates in the space. All this warns us that the library is a living and, by extension, evolving organization. Ex Libris: The New York Library These are some of the first thoughts I made when I watched the beasty New York Public Library in the documentary by Frederic Weissman Ex libris, which was screened at this year's Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, and will soon be distributed also in Athens. With the equally brutal duration of 3 hours and 17 minutes, the documentary covers all the multifarious activities of this library, founded in 1895, and began to take its present form in the first decade of the 20th century when its central building was inaugurated Fifth Avenue and its first branches were established. If the length of the documentary is great, the scope of activities included in the NYPL operation, as its acronym, is equally extensive. In addition to borrowing or fieldwork in print and / or digital form, these activities also include the preservation of manuscript and archive collections, the observance of a collection of images classified by topic (eg dogs in action), meetings with writers and artists (see, among other things, Richard Nokkin, Elvis Costello and Patty Smith), seminars and lessons for acquiring skills that the current era recognizes as necessary (eg behavior during an interview (excellent exchange of views on Eros during cholera), lectures and discussions on a literally unlimited variety of topics, educational programs for preschool and school age children, English lessons for people who have another mother tongue (in this case the Chinese of Chinatown), art exhibitions, concerts and screenings of films, and many more, all which make up an impressive and self-evident list (it is possible to organize and fitness classes for seniors? But it is). Weseman does not want to miss any aspects of the work being done here. <snip> For the rest of the analysis and some comments on libraries in Greece USE THIS LINK https://www.bookpress.gr/politismos/sinema/ex-libris-new-york-public-librar… June S ------------------------- June Samarascomparison to libraries in KALAMOS BOOKS (For Books about Greece) 2020 Old Station Rd Streetsville,Ontario Canada L5M 2V1 Tel : 905-542-1877 E-mail : kalamosbooks(a)gmail.com www.kalamosbooks.com http://kalamosb.alibrisstore.com/ http://www.antiqbook.com/books/bookseller.phtml/kal