Renovation of the Israel National Library

THE JEWISH JOURNAL: Reimagining Israel’s new national library (Tom Teicholz).

These are but two of the treasures of the library’s collection, which includes more than 5 million items, among them the archives of leading Jewish and Israeli figures such as S.Y. Agnon, Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem. There are some 35,000 rare books, 10,000 Hebrew manuscripts and 74,000 rolls of microfilmed manuscripts (comprising 90 percent of all known Hebrew manuscripts and including photos of segments from the Cairo Genizah).

The Islam and Middle East collection has 2,400 manuscripts in Arabic script and more than 100 manuscripts of the Quran dating back to the ninth century. There is a collection of rare and ancient maps dating back to the 15th century, and 30,000 hours of recorded songs related to Jewish traditions in communities all over the world.

The new National Library will be housed in a gleaming, state-of-the-art building by Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron. The design, simulations of which can be seen on the National Library website (web.nli.org.il), is a modernist wedge atop a glass core, in which the library’s vast holdings can be seen. It also features indoor and outdoor community spaces for cultural events.

There will be a central reading room with a giant oval skylight, which speaks to both the serious scholarship and openness the library hopes to foster. For the library’s invaluable collections, there will be a secure, climate-controlled, underground storehouse.

Finally, for those who can’t visit the library in person, there will be multi-language access to the library’s digitized collections as well as related collections held in institutions all over the world.

I was aware of the INL digitization project, on which more here and here and links, but as far as I can recall this is the first time I've heard about the renovation of the Library itself. It sounds like an exciting project.