Abstract
The author examines the relation between the use and the conservation in the role of the library in its socio-cultural setting.
First, the author sees the correlation between the graphic record, that is, the physical embodiment of information and the physical form of the book through an analysis of the transmission as to time and space.
Secondly, the author analyses the logic of the traditional skills in library services with particular attention to the value difference between the two seemingly concompatible concepts of information which can be expressed by such paired opposites as; individuality and collectivity, originality and authority, privacy and publicness, property and rank, and so on.
Finally, assuming that the role of the library is not always an intermediary service to the act of communication between men and graphic records, but one of those services to the act of communication between a human being and another, the author presents a conceptual analysis of the traditional role of the preservation and transmission of the cultural heritage.
