Leggere la biblioteconomia di Ettore Fabietti

Abstract

The contribution proposes some considerations based on the book by Giovanni Di Domenico Organismo che cresce: la biblioteca nell’opera di Ettore Fabietti, Roma, Associazione italiana biblioteche, 2019, centered on the intellectual personality of the “apostle” of popular libraries, according to the expression coined by Giuseppe Prezzolini. In this sense we proceeded with the development of a text that is partly a traditional “review”, and partly develops some implications related to the contents examined in this important publication. Di Domenico’s book is significant above all for its object, Ettore Fabietti, and for his role in the experience of popular libraries, one of the two horns of the problematic “dualism” that characterizes, according to Paolo Traniello, the overall profile of the history of Italian libraries. Furthermore, the work, in the context of a careful “re-reading”, tries to make explicit some analogies between Fabietti’s and Ranganathan’s thought, in a tight dialogue that correlates two perspectives of reflection that are very different, and in any case highly representative, of coeval library science.