Il tempo del bibliotecario

The concept of time, which has always been central to the lives of human beings, has become more and more the subject of reflection in recent years. Accelerated time, lack of time, need for time, quality time, quantity of time, found time, slow time. The second of the Cinque tesi per le biblioteche che verranno states that libraries can transform the reader’s time by reducing the time of access to the act of reading, but also by directing and activating “generative and creative relationships among books-in all their forms and subject matter, between books and readers, and among readers.” What about the librarian’s time? How much does and can it affect the reader’s time? What are the elements that affect it? The paper proposes an initial reading of librarian time from a cross-sectional analysis of textual data collected during several surveys conducted within BIBLAB - Laboratory of Social Librarianship and Applied Research in Libraries (Sapienza University of Rome).