Libraries: outreach and cultural extension service, also research support

Abstract

Libraries have an important internal workload: cataloguing, exchange, collection management, etc. that can take up almost all of our time. From my point of view, focusing only on these tasks could be a mistake. Certainly there are libraries, especially national libraries, that must be extremely careful with the descriptions they make because they are references in their countries. On the one hand, all libraries must optimize space and carry out work related to this management since we have many books and other supports for a limited and, in many cases, increasingly reduced space. On the other hand, however, we must not lose sight of the fact that, although technical processes are essential to facilitate the search and location of collections, this work is not the purpose of the library. It is a means, essential, of course, to search, to obtain data, to exploit in many cases this data and to locate the collections. But it is not the end in itself of libraries.