A geography of the world library, scales of literacy ; Géographie de la bibliothèque mondiale, les échelles de la littératie

Abstract

The world library is a complex, specialized system comprising all the texts available all over the world. Though ingrained in the digital revolution and multimedia tools, its construction is nonetheless based on a fairly ordinary pattern : the library with books. In a sense redefined for the sake of geography, literacy designates practices and public policies regarding readingand writing. World library and literacy are also two common preoccupations of geography, which we offer to take seriously by working into them the issues of scale and mobility. That is, is the national level always the level of organization dominating literacies in the world ? What are, within these, the likely future outcomes close to the infra and supranational scales ?To go beyond an overly abstract approach, we have strongly sought out the testimonies of agents of literacy through interviews, in a quest combining research and action, as well as by debunking the literary belief. Along the lines of the New Literacy Studies, we have multiplied the small fields in a geographical inventory of forms and levels (dumped libraries, Aran, provincialisms, Nobel Prize). We have also investigated the issue in two nation-states – Mali and South Korea – chosen each for its relative distance from the French model. The game of scales under observation reveals that the globalization of literacy grows in a highly differentiated manner depending on the environments, particularly with regard to the national project. The twisting of this once central level liberates/constrains the agents, so that multilevel dynamics allow us thento interpret such complex workings. Cultural planning is a multi-scale political issue ; La bibliothèque mondiale est le système spatialisé complexe de tous les textes disponibles dans le monde. Aujourd'hui saisie par la révolution numérique et le multimédia, elle est pourtant construite à partir d'une figure ordinaire : la bibliothèque de livres. Dans un usage redéfini pour la géographie, la littératie désigne les pratiques et les ...