Exhibition “Is a Library a Birthright?”

The exhibition opens the culmination year of the series of events “500 years of Latvian Books”. It will encourage people to think about a library and reading as cornerstones of a democratic society. As already reported, the five-year programme (2021–2025) of the extensive series of events “500 Years of Latvian Books” is designed to highlight the most significant processes that have contributed to the spread of the written and printed word in the Latvian language over the past 500 years.

The exhibition “Is a Library a Birthright?” is imaginative, intellectually reflective and also political, the exhibition is a must-see for everyone who loves books and even more for those who do not yet love them. The central element is Riga City Library (1524) – the first public library in Riga established five centuries ago during the iconoclasm, most of whose collection was destroyed in the World War II. The story of Riga City Library is full of drama and vivid, surprising details. The exhibition uses it as an example to encourage us to think of and discuss changes in society and thought processes today, emphasizing that the library as a model of the world reflects far broader regularities in both individual and collective efforts to organize, comprehend and understand the world around us. Literacy, books and libraries are important elements, also in shaping a vision of the future, and the exhibition uses the history of libraries to ask again a question: would we like the future to be in the hands of an illiterate and uncritical thinking society?