Opening on 5 May 2019.
Catalog Room
The exhibition titled «From the Library to Wisdom: Paths of the Book», curated by Dr. António Eugénio Maia do Amaral, was held in the Catalog Room between May 5th and 10th, 2019, and it addressed the evolution of the book over time. The book (or monograph) is a unit of original information that follows a plan, produced at a precise moment and presented in a finished form for sequential reading. The book is always an intellectual work (opus) of one or several authors, even if these are not known. It is not essential that it be printed on paper: a book can be handwritten, or even electronic. Not all printed resources are books (journal or magazine articles do not follow a pre-plan, for example) and an e-book is clearly a book: finite, non-updatable and with well-determined authorship/production data, which allow it to be situated as an intellectual work in time and space. Regardless of how it is presented, the book has been the main support for knowledge. A small artefact that allows those seeking knowledge to produce Science or Humanisties, in a critical way, by placing them in relation with other similar small artefacts. Therefore, university libraries today have the duty to establish themselves as places of resistance against fragmentary, second-hand information, which presents itself without material support, without a determined authorship, without a form perfectly fixed in time and, therefore, impossible to use in the cumulative and critical construction of Wisdom.
Without books there are no “paths”.