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"Already this year, about 240 employees, or one-quarter of the staff, have been let go from the Argentinean National Library. Free services for the country,s inhabitants have been cut back. Projects such as the new Digital library and the recently opened Museum of Books and Language are endangered. The reason for this plight is the massive budget cutbacks in the public sector under the new Argentinean president, Mauricio Macri. When he was inaugurated in December 2015, the director of the National Library in Buenos Aires, Horacio González, resigned. Because this position is a political office, the country,s political conflicts are often reflected in the most important library of the land. The journalist Sandra Schmidt spoke with the former library director, on behalf of BuB, about this unusual, and in Germany quite unimaginable, situation.
González,s most famous predecessor was the writer and intellectual Jorge Luis Borges, who suffered from a life-long condition of poor eyesight and began to go blind in 1950. In 1955 he lost his vision entirely, and in the same year also became the director of the Argentinean National Library. One of those who read aloud to him was Alberto Manguel, who in 2015 was appointed as the successor of González. Manguel, who is a well-known writer, university instructor, and translator, will take up office in July 2016. But further conflicts can be expected, especially after Manguel stated in an interview with the newspaper "La Nación"on the occasion of this year,s book fair in Buenos Aires at the end of April that, in future, the Argentinean National Library should be nothing more than an institution in which one can read books. This idea has not been well received by the library staff.