The students of the MAS had the opportunity to visit the Werner Oechslin library in Einsiedeln. They were received by the Dr. Oechslin who gave a spontaneous lecture. One of the topics of  discussions was the importance of lenguages such as Latin and Greek to have access to the knowledge contained on those books.

This is an abstract of the history of the library:

The beginnings of the Werner Oechslin Library reach back to a time when the study of source texts and their validation through checking original documents was only acknowledged to be of peripheral importance, significant at most in narrow fields of specialist research. Today attitudes towards source material research have radically changed. Uncertainty and new focuses within the humanities require that underlying foundations be examined, and this has led to new evaluations and often also to utterly new discoveries. Interest in sources and insight into the necessity of studying them – precisely, too, where thought formulations, scientific models and attempts to develop an integrated grasp and understanding are involved – is nowadays greater than ever before, and continues to grow.

Thanks to patient preparatory work, the Werner Oechslin Library Foundation now offers a tool that can do justice to the demands of source studies, and support interest in academic work based on original texts. Since 1980, large parts of the library have been in Einsiedeln. This resource expanded considerably with the return of Werner Oechslin in 1985, after years of work in Italy, the USA and Germany, when the library was systematically developed and enlarged. At external instigation the decision was made to transform this private library into a public institution, in order to make it available to a larger circle of academics. In 1996 the architect Mario Botta had drafted plans for a new library building project, that were realized in several stages, hampered by numerous difficulties. On June 9th 2006 we could celebrate the inauguration of this unique Library in the presence of Pascal Couchepin (Swiss Federal Council) and 160 guests.

www.bibliothek-oechslin.ch