Qatar mega-library defies protest and woos youth

DOHA: The Gulf’s largest book collection, Qatar’s National Library, has extended ties with libraries outward a segment and wooed younger readers in a initial year, as an anti-Doha protest drags on.

Scores of children wobble in and out of a banked rows of shelves or lay on beanbags clutching books during a feet of a immeasurable columns that support designer Rem Koolhaas’ 45,000-square-metre mega-structure.

Every singular book in a children’s library was borrowed in a initial 6 months as a QNL has sought to equivocate a boredom of some world-class libraries and attract immature readers.

It has marketed itself as a “noisy” library and facilities a 120-seat auditorium and a special events area during a heart of a naturally illuminated space that is suggestive of a complicated airport.

“All of a books we see in this place can be borrowed by a users,” pronounced a library’s emissary executive executive Stuart James Hamilton.

“Unlike many of a inhabitant libraries, we have a open library duty that goes alongside a inhabitant and investigate library functions.”

With over one million books and 500,000 digital editions, a library, located in Doha’s Education City, is a largest in a Middle East.

But a United Arab Emirates is sharpened to surpass Qatar with a Dubai-based Mohammed bin Rashid Library, anticipating to residence 1.5 million volumes when it opens.

Tensions between a UAE and Qatar erupted in Jun 2017 when a Emirates assimilated a Saudi-led fondness that imposed an mercantile and tactful protest on Doha, accusing it of ancillary Iran and Islamist movements — charges Qatar denies.

“We’re in an intriguing conditions here politically, though from a library’s viewpoint it only creates us some-more penetrating to make certain that a form is lifted and connectors are done with other countries,” pronounced Hamilton.

The library has also brought brazen skeleton to combine and strech out to libraries outward a segment in response to a embargo, Hamilton added.

“We’re accelerating outreach,” he said.

Since opening, a establishment has also staged some-more than 1,000 open events, many featuring authors and scholars from Europe and North America — a mystic miracle in a face of a informal boycott.

– ‘Not holding anything back’ –

Opened on Apr 16, 2018, a library is partial of gas-rich Qatar’s expostulate to revoke coherence on hydrocarbons and focus to a knowledge-based economy.

The building is designed to demeanour like folded sheets of paper and employs some-more than 39 nationalities, has 144,000 members and has loaned some-more than one million items.

Experts guess a total public, university and inhabitant library to have cost around $300 million (263.8 million euros).

Inside, rows of primitive white shelves arise adult a kindly banked slip and designer Koolhaas has formerly pronounced he wanted readers to be means to “see all a books in a panorama”.

An open-topped subterranean reading room clad in marble binds birthright materials and artefacts associated to Qatari and informal history.

Qatar, horde of a 2022 World Cup, has faced increasing inspection over leisure of debate given apropos a horde nation, and questions have formerly been lifted about a leisure of libraries in a regressive Gulf region.

Hamilton pronounced that while there was no censorship of element in a library, books had to approve with a set of standards.

“The collection we have started has to be there for a users — we’re not holding anything back,” he said, adding that all new additions contingency accommodate collection growth discipline and can't foster “hate speech”.

“The ones we don’t have in a collection are a ones that don’t accommodate a customary — we don’t buy everything.”

Volumes on LGBT health are openly accessible notwithstanding homosexuality being bootleg in Qatar, as are vicious works on a country’s new domestic past.

“Any library like a Qatar National Library, (for example) a New York Public Library, needs to simulate a needs and interests of a users and a race so a collection develops in response to what a users want,” he added.

“Certainly there is no censorship of any materials here.”

Delighted readers from Qatar and around a universe have described a collection as “spectacular” and “a bliss for book-lovers”.—AFP

Article source: http://www.aaj.tv/2019/06/qatar-mega-library-defies-boycott-and-woos-youth/