Inside a modest office in Ras al-Nabeh in Beirut, Antoine Boulad talks animatedly about the historic creation of municipal public libraries in Lebanon’s capital city 15 years ago. Boulad, the president of the Lebanese nongovernmental organization ASSABIL and a member of the Friends of Public Libraries Association’s administrative committee, explains how a group of volunteers came to run Beirut’s municipal library system.

It was a time of reconstruction after Lebanon’s devastating 15-year civil war. But Boulad and a small group of volunteers were more concerned about restoring ties than rebuilding houses. “We thought the real reconstruction should not only be on the stone but on the human being, especially those Lebanese who spent 15 years scattered all over. The reconstruction would offer them spaces to meet, spaces to share, spaces to find themselves again, united in one society. This made us found the association,” Boulad told Al-Monitor.

The group did not start working with the Beirut municipality right away.

The evolution of their idea coincided with the first municipality elections in over 30 years, in 1998. The government did not know how to manage a municipal public library network, but signed a renewable three-year contract with ASSABIL. To start, the municipality provided the group with a free-of-charge space and minimal funding — ASSABIL has largely relied on private funding — and only two years after becoming an official nonprofit organization, Beirut's first municipal public library opened in Bachoura in 2000.