Objects of Political Desire VIII: A European project that you can touch and be touched by
An internet search reveals that until 2016 there was an inter-library service called The European Library, which was then merged into what we now call Europeana. Created in 2009 by a European Commission amazed by the potential of Google Books, Europeana is a long way from fulfilling that promise. It’s not a European library but rather an online repository of digital specimens from European national libraries.
In higher education institutions, in departments of European studies, and in Florence at the European University Institute, there are good and sometimes excellent research collections that can be described as “European”, but they are not public libraries open to ordinary citizens in the middle of the bustling streets of our capitals – precisely what a European Library could aim to be.
But wait a minute – couldn’t we say that any large library in Europe is a European library? In a sense, yes. The British Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France are extraordinary libraries and they are in Europe. But they are, like many of the continent’s most important libraries, national libraries, which give themselves universal missions in the name of knowledge, or also because of their countries’ imperial pasts.
