🌱Seed 😐Neutral 🟡Consideration 🍽️Community-Mission 📊Project
The Big Idea
What is the best use of a church library and the books it holds?
If you ask most people the purpose seems to be something along these lines:
- Let people check stuff out like a public library.
- Archive Church history
While it may seem like a dumb straightforward question to try and dig deeper into the image that sticks in my mind about libraries is the role of monastic libraries during the dark ages. While the Roman Empire was melting down and the political and economic landscape was changing, monastic libraries emerged as a place of learning and continuity. It offered a stable place to house books and carry them through the many changes generationally.
What if a church library could operate similarly in a very chaotic and ever changing digital and even economic world? What are the kinds of texts resources and information that may not always be easy to find?
Search engines have famously degraded in the quality of their results (need to find sources)
Preservation of History access to material not easily found Not about easy access more about access to things that are important And long term access
Church library as separate from Pastor’s library
Current factors that affect things
a A Holistic versus Mechanistic Perspective what about a perspective focused on life as the foundational activity of God in the world?
Avoidance of Tail Knowledge and Knowledge Collapse Search engine biases AI biases
History of Technology that affects things
printing press - access of printed
broadcast systems - few to the many
social media - many to the many
Instability of technological communication systems DVD and CD era in Church libraries short lived
Not likely to have professional librarians or archivists Generational focus rather than just practical
Things that Church libraries often have
Old out of print books or hymnals Bible study resources and helps History of Church and Lutheranism
The sterilization of history and artifacts as things that belong in museums out of reach
Example of codex sinaiticus being taken from its home and put in a bunch of random museums