What Kind Of Shocks Should I Get?

Biblioteche: una storia inquieta, di Matthew Battles

"Keep and destroy the knowledge from Alexandria to the Internet," reads the subtitle of this essay that, through the narration of events, random or deliberate, of famous libraries, dispels the myth, in which we like to think that libraries store and preserve and document all or almost all the knowledge accumulated throughout human history. If the library is a world, as we like to think too that is, how the world is imperfect and ephemeral, "as a world has its mutations and its seasons," said Battles.
If the library of papyrus rolls, or rather that of the two libraries Museion and the lowest of the temple of Serapis, of Alexandria were more victims of fires, the library of Nineveh, full of 25,000 clay tablets in cuneiform script was fireproof and many of his texts have survived and are now at Brithis Museum. In ancient Rome, the advent of Christianity as the dominant religion ushered in a dark time for the knowledge and ancient literature: the Christians built an identity in itself antagonistic to the pagan culture. However, the dream of the library Universal survived in the East, where Syria was long the guardian of Greek culture. And great libraries were born with the flourishing of Islam: in Baghdad, Damascus, Jerusalem. And then, in the Middle Ages, the love for the book, the beautiful and elegant book edited illuminators of Muslims, Islam and joined Christian Europe: purchased from the markets or the spoils of war, precious texts reached the European courts.
The public library, then revived in Florence in the fifteenth century through the work of Cosimo de 'Medici, his audience was made up of nobles, wealthy merchants, clergy.
And gradually, through the centuries and the stories of books and libraries, we find well-known events, such as that of Cardinal Sirleto, librarian vaticano, che inserì nell'Indice dei libri proibiti l'opera di Lorenazo Valla, perché dimostrava la falsità della donazione di Costantino su cui posava il potere temporale della Chiesa. E sempre a Roma incontriamo Montaigne, che, anch'egli, visitando la Vaticana notò che "... tutti la visitano e portano via quanto desiderano".
Il viaggio giunge fino al Novecento, il secolo a noi vicino e ricorda che esso pure non fu immune da distruzioni di libri e di biblioteche, dai roghi nazisti fino a quelli nei monasteri tibetani messi a ferro e fuoco dai soldati cinesi.
E nell'era digitale quale spazio per le biblioteche?  "... The very fact that libraries have gone through many phases appears to offer hope. In its determination of custody of books and words they contain, the library has faced and subdued the technology, the forces of change and often 'authority of the sovereign, "recalls the author, with optimism.

Matthew Bates, Libraries: a troubled history, Carocci Editore 2004