National Library of the Republic of Argentina
The National Library of the Republic of Argentina ( Spanish Biblioteca Nacional de la República Argentina ) is the largest library in Argentina and one of the most important in America . It is located in the Recoleta district of the Argentine capital Buenos Aires .
history
The library was founded in 1810 as the “Public Library of Buenos Aires” ( Biblioteca pública de Buenos Aires ) and was housed in the Cabildo for the first two years of its existence . In 1884, four years after Buenos Aires was named the Argentine capital, it became the national library . The official name has been Biblioteca Nacional Mariano Moreno since 2013 .
Its directors included Paul Groussac (1848–1929), who grew up in France and who emigrated to Argentina in 1865 and held the post from 1885 until his death in 1929. His successors were from 1931 to 1955 Gustavo Martínez Zuviría, known under the pseudonym Hugo Wast , and finally the famous writer Jorge Luis Borges from 1955 to 1973. The current director is Horacio González (* 1944 in Buenos Aires).
The current building with a view of the Río de la Plata , built in the style of brutalism , was started in 1972 and inaugurated on April 10, 1992 after 20 years of construction. The architects were Clorindo Testa, Francisco Bullrich and his wife Alicia Cazzaniga de Bullrich. They respected the tree protection requirement of leaving as much of the property undeveloped as possible so that only as few old trees as absolutely necessary had to be felled. For this reason, the ground floor was largely left free, the reading room was raised and the book stacks were relocated to three underground basement levels.
At the time of the move to the new building, most of the building was decades old and therefore in need of renovation again - a fact that is reflected in defects and recurring damage to the building technology to this day . In addition, the building is located on a slope that slopes down to the Río de la Plata, which in the event of floods or heavy rain means that the lowest of the three storage cellars is occasionally partially flooded due to the rise in the groundwater level, and thus permanent storage of library items in this storage area is made almost impossible.
The library has around 20 incunabula , including a copy of St. Augustine's De civitate Dei and two copies of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy .
Structure and stocks
In addition to the management and administration, the National Library is divided into the areas of monographs , newspapers and magazines, media library , photo and card department, and a lock and rarity department . The monographs and periodicals are in the basement magazine, special collections are in separate magazine rooms on the upper floors.
Since the material received by the National Library has not been uniformly inventoried since its foundation and over 70 different card catalogs and databases have been created for bibliographical indexing , it is difficult to give concrete information about the quantitative scope of the holdings. It has been known since the end of July 2006 that the number of monographs is in the order of 750,000 volumes.
Due to the very low acquisition budget of the National Library, the majority of the material comes to the library in the form of exchange and gifts, in the form of bequests or via the Argentine legal deposit right . The library only receives around a third of the publications to be submitted. Tax control has been transferred to the Argentine Book Trade Chamber and many of the publishers do not comply with the Legal Deposit Act. Since the Chamber of Booksellers determines the ISBN and ISSN at the same time , the National Library does not have a precise overview of book production and cannot systematically request the material. To solve this problem, a program was set up in which the gaps in the inventory are to be closed through purchase or donation negotiations with the publishers.
A standardized OPAC has been available to users for monographs since August 2006 , which makes research and ordering much easier.
literature
- Petra Arzbach: The library system in Argentina. In: Library Service . DBI, Berlin 30, 1996, H. 6, pp. 1046-1063.
- Ana María Peruchena Zimmermann: Libraries in Argentina. An overview. (PDF) In: IFLA Journal , Volume 30, 2004, No. 2. pp. 108–128.
- Christoph Müller: On the state of libraries in Buenos Aires. (PDF) In: Library Service . DBI, Berlin 41, 2007, H. 9/10, pp. 977-984.
- Paul Groussac: Historia de la Biblioteca Nacional. Biblioteca Nacional, Buenos Aires 1893. New edition: Cuarto Poder, Buenos Aires 1976
- Horacio González: Historia de la Biblioteca Nacional. Estado de una polémica. Ediciones Biblioteca Nacional, Buenos Aires 2010, ISBN 978-987-9350-97-3 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ according to Ley Nº 26.807, adopted on November 28, 2012, published January 8, 2013
- ^ Art Destination Buenos Aires
- ^ Christoph Müller: On the state of the library system in Buenos Aires. ( Memento of the original from September 23, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Library Service . DBI, Berlin 41, 2007, no. 9/10, p. 977.
- ^ Christoph Müller: On the state of the library system in Buenos Aires. ( Memento of the original from September 23, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Library Service . DBI, Berlin 41, 2007, no. 9/10, p. 979.
- ^ Christoph Müller: On the state of the library system in Buenos Aires. ( Memento of the original from September 23, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Library Service . DBI, Berlin 41, 2007, no. 9/10, p. 978.
- ^ Christoph Müller: On the state of the library system in Buenos Aires. ( Memento of the original from September 23, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Library Service . DBI, Berlin 41 (2007), H. 9/10, pp. 979-980.
Coordinates: 34 ° 35 ′ 4 " S , 58 ° 23 ′ 53" W