While in countries such as Egypt, where the state has been playing a dominant role in cultural production and infrastructures, one can speak of a “monumental history of the state” and a fairly recent development of independent and alternative archives, the opposite has been the case in Lebanon. Private and independent archival initiatives have proliferated in Lebanon since the 1990s, and cultural production has often been marked by its engagement with archival practices, leading some to proclaim that “the investigation and appropriation of archives is the favorite recipe for artists here” and “Archivisme is a local disease” (Peeping Tom Digest, No.3, Beirut). Taking independent archives such as the Arab Image Foundation, the Arab Center for Architecture, UMAM Documentation & Research and IRAB Association for Arabic Music as a point of departure, this paper examines the relationship of the Lebanese National Library (LNL) to these alternative institutions. Having been closed to the public since its activities were frozen in the course of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) in 1979, the LNL is currently in the process of being reconstructed and is supposed to re-open to the public in the near future. The LNL sees two of its main functions as “collecting national works and developing the collections of the Library in order to become an institution of national memory”, and “conserving memory and intellectual production”. In a fragmented environment such as the Lebanese one, with many private initiatives and little state presence, does the LNL have a unifying role to play? How does it complement civil society and private initiatives, many of which have been active on the scene since the end of the civil war, how is it received by those independent institutions? Who determines its vision; to what extent does it provide a space for debate about knowledge production and national memory? Sources include interviews, grey literature from relevant institutions, legal documents, news reports and the existing literature on the Lebanese cultural sector.