Blog del Instituto Cervantes de Londres

An online conference held over 3 weeks
Wednesdays 14, 21 and 28 October 2020, from 4 to 6pm

 Choose your slot(s) & register for free

The seminar will seek to explore the ways libraries can play a vital role in the times of crisis through online presentations from speakers in Europe and through highly interactive sessions involving the audience.

The breadth of the chosen topic is expected to cover the themes of health epidemic, environmental issues/catastrophe or socio-economic/wartime crisis involving the migration or subjugation of large numbers of people and the role a library or group of libraries has played in alleviating the situation.

Spanish Speaker  | For What Kinds of Crises are Libraries Useful for? by Lluis Anglada, as part of the SESSION 2| Wednesday 21st Octobre | 4.00pm (GMT) REGISTER

We will examine the measures taken by Spanish libraries in the recent Covid-19 crisis and also those taken in the 2008 economic crisis. In these cases, but also in environmental catastrophes, libraries can help, but this is not their role.
What does crisis mean? There are different kinds of crises; these can be big or small, short-term or long-term and often they will not affect all people in the same way.
In confusing and troubling times, libraries have to re-examine why they were created; as spaces where the public could access information. Meanwhile, this necessity for libraries is disappearing given the accelerated change of society where information can be distributed rapidly across the globe.
Globalisation and sustainability are new challenges (or crises) that people have to cope with. Are these challenges related in some way to the function of a library?
In the talk, we will try to characterise what kind of crises libraries are facing and how libraries and librarians have to react in order to continue being useful and relevant.

Lluís Anglada, currently is Director of Open Science in the CSUC (Consortium of Services for the Universities of Catalonia); Previously, he was the director of the CBUC (Consortium of Catalan Academic Libraries) and director of the Catalonia Technical University Libraries.  He has been a member of several professional boards at the national and international level (SPARC Europe, LIBER, OCLC’s Global Council) and also of publisher advisory councils (ProQuest, Wiley, Nature…) He has published about 40 articles and book chapters. Founder of the blogs BDig y Blok de Bid. 

For more information, please visit:

https://eurolis.wordpress.com/seminar-2020/