What is the purpose of national libraries? This question was raised by Alberto Manguel in his book The Library at Night. While Manguel in no way wants to deny that a national library has specific tasks in a society, he draws attention to the fact that national libraries are historically evolved entities whose remit varies depending by state, so that different national libraries may share fewer commonalities than their name suggests.
Since even the concept of a ‘nation’ is increasingly being deemed problematic and since archive libraries have been attributed additional tasks alongside their traditional ones, i.e. the legal deposit, the National Library of Luxembourg is hosting leading figures of the library world to discuss these new challenges. Topics will include collection mandates, repatriation policies, provenance research, digitisation and new international legal frameworks for knowledge transfer.
The panel discussion with IFLA president Barbara Lison, Director of the Royal Library of the Netherlands Lily Knibbeler and CENL president and Director of the German National Library Frank Scholze will be held in German on 3rd March at 7.00 pm at the National Library of Luxembourg.
Free admission.
More information on bnl.lu (in German).