From cave paintings to the digital library on the Net, in six richly illustrated chapters Uwe Jochum, chief librarian at the University of Constance, covers about 20,000 years of library history in his "Geschichte der abendländischen Bibliotheken" (i.e., History of Western Libraries). Goethe.de spoke with the author.

Mr. Jochum, what made you begin your history of libraries about 20,000 years ago with the caves of Lascaux and Altamira?

I was guided by the idea that libraries, up to the most recent past, have always been places and three-dimensional spaces of knowledge, regardless whether they were stored in books, journals, on papyri or parchment codices.

That begins with the cave paintings. These are – contrary to what the term suggests – not aesthetic representations of reality but rather very complex systems of signs, which have still not been completely deciphered. Here for the first time in human history was a medial, spatial record of knowledge.

How has the architecture of libraries changed in the course of history?

What you can see is a tension in library architecture: phases of splendid, stately buildings alternate with phases of purely functional architecture. The princes of early modernity, for instance, wanted to express their status through stately buildings, including libraries. Interestingly, even in the nineteenth century, when the middle classes move into the role of the princes, the great national libraries that were built in Europe were initially copies of such architecture.

Whether the new libraries that have recently been built in Cottbus and Berlin belong in the corner of display or of functionality is a matter of debate.

How long has there been the profession of librarian as we know it today?

The profession is relatively young. In the modern sense of the term it has existed only since the late seventies of the nineteenth century, when Europe and America perfected the state bureaucracy and out of this grew the need to hire expert administrators of bureaucratic processes.

Before that, you became a librarian when you were a scholar and, as a professor at a university, ran the library in a subsidiary function. The profession then developed all over the world from a scholarly-academic one into an administrative career.

The monastery libraries in the Middle Ages were reserved exclusively for the clergy. When did libraries become public institutions, open to everybody?

In the twenties of the nineteenth century the middle classes demanded and campaigned for the right to unrestricted access to libraries. In the eighteenth century, civic clubs had already formed reading societies. They were the nucleus of the self-administered, civic library. Out of these clubs arose in the nineteenth century the public library provided by the state for its citizens.

Today knowledge is being made increasingly available on the Net. You see in this a danger. What?

To begin with the specific problem for libraries, in the whole history of libraries, man constructed them as three-dimensional spaces of knowledge. Since then, you could go up and down the shelves and so orient yourself topographically. This is a very easy and very effective access to the transmission of knowledge. Digitalization has now led to being able to call up knowledge on a screen. A three-dimensional, spatial logic is being replaced by a two-dimensional screen presentation.

This form of presentation means at bottom a withdrawal of knowledge. At Google, the most popular search engine, you can find incredibly many things incredibly fast ...

… about 14 million results in 0.15 seconds for the tag “library”“, for example ...

... but the result is a monstrously long list of information, a kind of endless sheet of toilet paper through which you have to scroll. There is only above and below, and relevance can no longer be represented, except that Google claims that according to its “page ranking” the most important is at the top.

The ease of access to vast masses of documents and information is in disproportion to our ability to relate this mass to ourselves usefully in an ordered form. We get a lot very fast, but it matters less and less what we get.