A Library That Holds Its Own Among Museums

The Qatar National is not just a model for celebrity-designed library buildings. It also underscores the links between books and manuscripts and the country’s cultural heritage.

· 485,000-square-foot building, which opened in 2018, houses more than a million books and the country’s Heritage Collection, including more than 235,000 centuries-old manuscripts, books, maps, globes and other materials.

· But in a library, you create your own narrative.

· Light is everywhere, transforming the terraced main room into the exact opposite of the stuffy and dark libraries of old and reflecting the space in the ceiling’s white mirrorlike panels.

· In the past libraries were mainly focused on providing access to knowledge, but in recent years libraries have needed to bring out their collections for people to engage with them.

· Tan explained that the library uses optical character recognition, or O.C.R., for digitizing all manuscripts, which allows specific word searches.

· Heritage materials have always been treasured in this part of the world, but they were often kept privately in families or in mosques.

· Museum curators have almost evolved to a place of sharing works or owning them halftime, like a library.

[ABS News Service/27.09.2024]

With the look of a jagged-edge spaceship brought to Earth and illuminated from almost every angle by the ever-present Gulf sunshine, the Qatar National Library stands out among the growing number of celebrity architect-designed libraries.

The 485,000-square-foot building, which opened in 2018, houses more than a million books and the country’s Heritage Collection, including more than 235,000 centuries-old manuscripts, books, maps, globes and other materials.

Yet those associated with its evolution over the past six years, including its designer, the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, says they believe it fits squarely into Qatar’s ambitious plan to become a major museum hub.

“In a museum you get a curator telling a story and you have no choice but to absorb what is being presented to you,” Koolhaas said in a recent phone interview from the Netherlands. “But in a library, you create your own narrative. The material in the Heritage Library is of such a caliber that it could be considered works of art, so this really makes this building both a museum and a library.”

The Heritage Library is housed in an exposed mazelike series of rooms with travertine walls beneath the main floor, evoking the excavated pits of, say, the Colosseum in Rome. That blends into the rows of bookshelves of the main library stacked like bleachers in the main room, which reaches 48.5 feet at its highest point. Light is everywhere, transforming the terraced main room into the exact opposite of the stuffy and dark libraries of old and reflecting the space in the ceiling’s white mirrorlike panels.

The decision to house the Heritage Collection within this vast space was part of the evolution of the library, Koolhaas said.

“Architecture has always been a combination of situations where you have no choice, and situations where you have many choices,” he said. “What was exciting for me as an architect is that the Qatar National Library was first designed as an academic library, but then it became the national library, and then I was asked to absorb the Heritage Collection. To accommodate the Heritage Collection, the only choice we had was to excavate the ground floor.”

For Aisha Al-Ansari, the head of Heritage Collection, this part of the library has become its soul.

“It’s like you’re trying to find a treasure,” she said in a recent video interview. “There are manuscripts and printed books in Arabic and other languages, photos, historical maps and more than 400 items that can be seen on display as you walk through. Many people aren’t used to having a library that displays so many items.”

Organized tours for local and international visitors, as well as local schools, have become a big part of the library’s identity, Al-Ansari said. They are able to see such items as a 1478 copper plate engraving by the printer Konrad Sweynheim of a map created by Ptolemy in the second century that mentions Catara (the Latin word for Qatar) for the first time, and a page (or leaf) from the Blue Mushaf, a rare Quranic manuscript written in gold Kufic script on blue parchment from the ninth century.

“It was so important for us to have this collection seen when we moved into this new building because we wanted to highlight all of this to the younger generations of Qatar,” she said. “Displaying so many items helps so much when giving a tour. When I curate an exhibition and I hear a dialogue between, say, a father and son about what they’re looking at, then I know my job is done.”

In a digital era when there seems to be nonstop chatter about the death of the printed book, other libraries around the world come to mind: the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt; the Tianjin Binhai Library in China; the Vennesla Library in Norway; and the Starfield Library in South Korea. Digital preservation is key to these high-tech libraries, much like the Qatar National Library.

“In the past libraries were mainly focused on providing access to knowledge, but in recent years libraries have needed to bring out their collections for people to engage with them,” Tan Huism, the executive director of the Qatar National Library, said in a recent video interview. “Museums digitize much of their collection, but when it comes to manuscripts and books, sometimes they only do the cover and the back, but not the entire book.”

Tan explained that the library uses optical character recognition, or O.C.R., for digitizing all manuscripts, which allows specific word searches.

Digitizing and preserving are part of the identity — and duty — of a national library, she added, especially in a part of the world where religion and political turmoil have often defined how cultural items such as manuscripts were or were not preserved. And like museums, libraries are now engaged in recovering and protecting cultural artifacts from theft and exploitation.

The library is part of the Himaya Project, a cooperation with Interpol and the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions to prevent the illicit trafficking of illegally obtained ancient manuscripts and other materials in this part of the world. In 2022 the library helped intercept nearly a dozen manuscripts stolen from Afghanistan from 2016 to 2019 that were slated for sale at major international auction houses.

“Heritage materials have always been treasured in this part of the world, but they were often kept privately in families or in mosques,” Tan said. “The concept of a national library or a national museum as part of a national identity is new here, and the region has seen its fair share of displacement, which has made it ripe for unscrupulous dealers or syndicates to benefit.”

In an era when museums around the world are being questioned about who really owns their collections, the Qatar National Library could be seen as a model for future preservation and what it means to be a library and a museum.

“There is much less a sense of ownership in this age of restitution, and there is probably not a single museum where there isn’t a large number of items being contested,” Koolhaas said. “Museum curators have almost evolved to a place of sharing works or owning them halftime, like a library. This is an interesting alternative to what it means to absolutely have a piece of art in a museum.”