About Libraries

The publication you are holding is the result of a fortuitous meeting and an important collaboration. It stems primarily from the creative spirit, the great, systematic work of Kostas Staikos and the knowledge he has passionately accumulated about libraries’ architecture, history and collections over time.

Since our organisations’ start, we at EKT have been collaborating with libraries and Greek knowledge organizations, in order to support them in their transition to the digital age, to showcase the rich variety of their collections and to further facilitate knowledge circulation, which is our founding purpose.

With Kostas Staikos we share a common goal: to enrich and encourage the dialogue between people and the valuable cache of knowledge accumulated in libraries. He is a book historian and a researcher of Hellenic typographic and publishing history since the Renaissance era, who faithfully serves the art of publishing. So we went ahead with our collaboration by creating “About Libraries” website (www.aboutlibraries.gr), where all the available material is made accessible. This content will continue to grow through collaborations with the library network in Greece and abroad and will be available in a user-friendly search environment accompanied by clear licensing information.

At “About Libraries” researcher material meets our technical know-how, state-of-the-art technologies and the organisation's documentation and open access culture. One can find documents and visual material on the libraries’ history in the Western and Eastern world, from antiquity to today as well as information on libraries’ evolution and typology, the historical context and the intellectual movements that helped shape them. Moreover, for the libraries still present today, one can find information on the history and collections.

A product of continuous bibliographic and iconographic research, “About Libraries” will be constantly updated by an interdisciplinary team. The classification system that has been developed in order to answer various research questions offers different options for navigating the content, which is displayed as thematic categories and can be indexed alphabetically, chronologically and geographically.

We want to offer an easy-to-use and exciting guide for different user communities looking for information channels and access to knowledge resources. Our ambition is to facilitate this content to reaffirm its universal value, to meet its audience, to influence and be of value in research, in education, in the public sphere. At the same time, we aim to highlight the history and modern day operation of Greek libraries, drawing on data not only from archival sources, but also from the libraries we are contacting.

On the pages of the print edition, the reader has a prelude of what follows in the digital space. One can see a presentation of the types of libraries and some iconic examples that stand out in modern Greek history: the National Library of Greece, a monastic library, a municipal library, a private library and a university library. However, the content of the website is not limited to Greece as it has a universal dimension and scope.

Kostas Staikos edited this publication for the reader's enjoyment and in order to share knowledge with an “exceptional dimension of depth, offered by the visual experience” as noted by K.Th. Dimaras. We are committed to maintaining this quality in the digital environment.