Dolors 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.

Jorge Luis Borges, in his Poem of the WomenHe wrote: "I always imagined Paradise would be some kind of library." Now, however, in a must-see documentary on Movistar+, you'll discover that libraries in the United States have become a hellhole, especially those in public schools and colleges.

"It hurts me that no one has contacted me or informed me, and I also don't understand why they want to change the name, because my grandfather hasn't done anything wrong. It's absurd," says Adela Alòs-Moner, librarian and cleaner at the Ramon d'Alòs-Moner Library. Adela laments that the city council wants to change the name of the library that bears her grandfather's name. The residents' association of the Besòs i el Maresme neighborhood in Barcelona also disagrees, having issued a statement expressing their incomprehension: "We do not agree that the Ramon de Alòs-Moner Library should change its name when it is moved to the new building on Alfonso el Magnánimo Street. Rather, we believe that this change is motivated by a unilateral decision on the part of the Sant Martí district and the Memory and Gender Commission," they assert. The name of Ana María Matute came up at a meeting of the Consell de Barris (Neighborhood Council). "We were told this was the proposed name and that the residents hadn't been consulted. We fought hard to make the history known, and in 1970, it was very difficult to name a library after a Republican," says José Manuel López, president of the residents' association.

When World War I broke out, a group of women traveled to France to join the American Committee for Devastated Regions (CARD), founded by Anne Morgan (1873–1952), daughter of banker J.P. Morgan. Among these women was the American librarian Jesse Kit Carson (1876–1959), who revolutionized French libraries amidst the devastation of war. Among many other things, she founded five permanent libraries and created fifty mobile libraries in the north. “She refused to be defeated by the French bureaucracy, where many men were entrenched, sexist, and elitist, and she worked to ensure that libraries had children’s literature sections and open-access systems, both unheard of in France at that time,” explains the writer Janet Skeslien Charles (Conrad, 1971). The librarians on the front linesTranslated into Catalan by Mar Vidal and published by Navona.