Dolors Lamarca, a pillar of the Catalan library world, dies
He directed and modernized the Library of Catalonia and launched the Catalan library system in a democratic context.
BarcelonaDolors Lamarca, a key figure in the modernization of the Catalan library system with the advent of democracy, died this Wednesday in Barcelona at the age of 82 from pneumonia. Born in Granollers in 1943, she had lived in Castellterçol in recent years. Widowed for decades after the death of Antoni Comas (1931-1981), who in the late post-war period was the first professor of Catalan language and literature at the University of Barcelona, they had three daughters: Eulàlia, Núria, and Mercè. In fact, Comas's premature death at the age of 50 came when Lamarca had assumed the directorship of the new Library Service (1980-1983) within the Department of Culture of the Generalitat of Catalonia under the first Pujol government, with Max Cahner as minister, where she laid the foundations for the current library system (1981). However, she did not achieve the integration of the Barcelona Provincial Council's network into a global Catalan network.
A respected and prestigious professional, an avid reader—of Catalan and world literature, with favorite authors such as WG Sebald, among many others—with extensive training as a philologist and an opera enthusiast, from 1984 to 2000 she directed and modernized the historic Library of the University of Barcelona and created a historic University of Barcelona Library that seems obvious today, but was not then.
Building on this experience, and with her characteristic drive, from 2004 to 2012 she directed the Library of Catalonia, where she initiated the digitization of heritage collections—the agreement with Google Books Search proved decisive—and attempted, unsuccessfully—with the collaboration of Oriol Bohi—to establish a facility that would occupy the entire grounds of the former Gothic Hospital of Santa Creu, including the Rubió and Lluch Gardens.
During those seven years, under the motto "Open, reliable, and useful," she gave the national library a new impetus in terms of organization, cataloging, and acquisitions, as well as improving its civic dimension and its European and international reach—she was fluent in English and knew the United Kingdom well. With the death of Dolors Lamarca, the Catalan library world loses one of its leading figures of the last half-century.