Haciendo camino al andar: Saberes bibliotecarios desde el sudoeste bonaerense (Bahía Blanca, 1880-1930)

Located in Bahía Blanca, on the southwest coast of Buenos Aires province, the Bernardino Rivadavia Popular Library has established itself as a regional reference center since its creation in 1882. During the first decades of the 20th century, a network of personal, institutional, and textual relationships was organized around it, shaping a collective knowledge founded on praxis, upon which the foundations for a shared library culture were laid. This article proposes a situated analysis of this institution’s internal documentation in order to reconstruct, through it, the processes of knowledge construction in spaces far removed from the hubs of political power and intellectual debate. To this end, we recover the role played within the province by interlibrary links, local agents, and bibliographic collections in the development of this specialized field. The paper thus demonstrates how knowledge circulated and was appropriated by institutions according to the specific possibilities and conditions of the context, and at the same time it shows the way in which they contributed to defining a regional geopolitics.