User:Rita Graca/readingwriting3

Introduction to Shadow Libraries

Abstract (Library Genesis)

Library Genesis is a digital library with a catalog of more than 25 million documents. The website owners describe themselves as “random book collectors”, which means they don’t accept requests or focus on curating materials. The topics are broad: from business, economy, and geology to housekeeping and leisure. The dimension of this library is enormous, there are even several copies of the same books. The content is mostly written material.
Although this huge library seems to take information without any specific methodology, the reasons don’t seem completely apolitical. The main page of the website links to a letter of solidarity with strong opinions on sharing materials, copyright, moral values, etc.
All people are encouraged to upload content and to download it too. There’s no score to maintain, log-in necessary, or price to pay. The desire of the platform to exist is well seen in the possibility of downloading all content, accessing the database and making mirrors.

Group reflection and questions

What could be the motivation to make such a library? What is the message they might be trying to spread?
The scale, the amount of data provided in a library is directly related to the energy and time needed to provide them.
How is responsibility distributed ?
How are shadow libraries of different scales and purposes interconnected?
Are shadow libraries interconnected to each other, even if they have different scales and purposes, because what they have in common is that they brake the law (so they are vulnerable)?
flag of convenience
Do they have moral goals, or anarchist goals? Is an anarchist goal immoral (or moral)?
Symbolic gesture
Is it a solidarity gesture?
You can copy the website and mirror it. They don't claim ownership
Is there a heroic attitude of "liberating" knowledge? (robin hood style)
What values does it communicate?
Can these values be seen as coming from a particular cultural context (e.g. post-Communist, Eastern-bloc samzidat techniques)?
Is it moral to publish books which have a commercial goal?
Is the librarian replaced by a random algorithm?
Is there a librarian?
Who is responsible and what are they responsible for?
Non-curation can be a critical position; it is nort imposing a particular position.
Are they collecting material just because they can?
Yes! No filters;
Is this dissident activity?
They don't care a lot about the quality, everything is welcome. Duplicated material
Do they try to curate doubled material?
Why is it easier to support piracy for academic research than for recreational purposes?
Distinctions between "knowledge" and "information" / Democratic principle of sharing knowledge in the name of progress / Providing a benefit to society What are the conditions of making something legitimate? (if we shift back to copyright - see also bootleg drugs,)
benefit for the greater good? is it based on profit?
What would be the first shadow library to be considered legitimate?
Why can't a fiction book (or anything besides articles) be considered research, culture, important to share, meaningful...?

Annotated actions

pad: https://pad.xpub.nl/p/08_05_19

Outline of the workshops

First

pad: https://pad.xpub.nl/p/IFL_22_05_19

Group project: create a library focused on the capacity of annotation.
What can be in this library besides books? How can we understand knowledge outside the written medium (books, articles, academic research...)
If we have different files, then what other forms of annotation, besides text annotation. Wants to explore this!
Examples of ways of annotating other media, as rapgenius.com, video annotation with time-stamps, video annotation on subtitles cues, hypothes.is, ...
How is this library going to be different than a cloud-folder? It is about 'sharing' -- making public. It means not only for ourselves but for a public. Because of time, the project will be first of all about why/how to annotate and maybe not about the notes themselves.

What collection deserves to be made public?
Media-on-media annotation?
Stretching the categories of knowledge by adding other media?

I find similarities with Artemis' project & Simon's?

Second

pad: https://pad.xpub.nl/p/IFL_22_05_19

Most of the subjects that we have been working on (such as piracy, file-sharing, and shadow libraries) work outside the law. Although illegal, sharing academic books seems to be morally acceptable by most of us. But what happens if we are studying Cinema, and watching a film becomes our research? Is it different to download a book or a song?

Aim:

Invite people to make choices to start a conversation on what we find moral, immoral, ethical, what we perceive as knowledge, role of pirate libraries, the importance of sharing the culture...
Talk about these activities in a group, shed light upon these issues
Because what is moral/immoral is so personal, some interesting confrontations can happen
The place where the workshops will happen is important. It would be interesting to go outside the artist/activist bubble and have diverse opinions.

But that can also be my role, to be the devil's advocate and ask more provoking questions.

Practical example:

Conversation starters where you divide the participants based on a question: "Move right if you think stealing a book is different than downloading it", "Move back if you don't know what the legal implications of downloading a file are", "If you'd write a book, would you consider distributing it for free?", etc.

Is important to start with easy questions to set an entry point for the workshop and to get a sense of the practical knowledge of the participants (I found difficult in the launch of the special issue 8 to start explaining my research because I didn't know how much the person knew about networks, if they were very informed or not at all)
(Possible inspiration: "A day in the courtroom" by Eva Weinmayr; "Middle ground"; "Conditional design workbook")

New Knowledge: through the discussions between the participants. But how does my knowledge, what we learned, gets visible?

How is annotation being discussed here?

We can annotate the discussion: with other questions that come up, answers, notes... what could be an interesting way of doing this?
Thinking besides written notes
If this discussion is recorded then annotated on, several layers can be put together.
The workshop shouldn't be the end point, but the starting point of the annotation

The questions should be related to the set of texts we are using as a group, quoting books, films, etc.

How to document the workshop?

The annotations seem to be an important part of the documentation.

How will people interface with my project?

Third

pad: https://pad.xpub.nl/p/IFL_2019-06-04-selection

Outline of the workshop with Biyi

After our interviews with Leeszaal, we will turn the questions to our audience, and encourage them to make decisions. (it's ok here to adapt a more provocative tone.)

Proposal: A system to facilitate discussion around librarianship on a more personal level.

Why: In different ways, all workshops try to bring hidden, marginal processes to the light.

Our workshop would like to turn the discussions about libraries, books, copyright and piracy from abstract concepts to real experiences.

Goal: Not only sharing the same opinions and discussing new ones but creating small communities.

For example, by saying that we all download books we aknowledge the issue.

How to do:

Make it spatial: (a reference is Middleground, Joana Chicau workshop, https://hackersanddesigners.nl/s/Summer_Academy_2018/p/Media_Choreographies:_rehearsal_series make the space as an axis to generate feedback) can get rid of the screen be an option? because the screen is a distraction because it's so centered! — we can divide the space would be nice to let the audience have a chance to witness documentation of workshop output

Our input:

We want to also provide input, and weave the input in a nice way during the question/discussion (not only rely on their answers, and it results in some kind of "consumer questionnaire poll" We enrich the discussion by providing background stories, small texts/articles, information

Tools: Is there any prototyping tool that would add value? help in some way?

Examples of questions:

I bought books from physical bookstores recently.
I bought books from online platforms recently. sub question: I bought the books from (which), (which), (which) platform. I buy from (which) platform most.
I follow suggestions from online platform recommendations, I found them useful.
I downloaded online pirate copies of books.
I made purchases of legal digital copies of books.
I keep a record of my book collections.
I bought a book in the last month.
I downloaded a book in the last month.
I've been in a library where the librarian was a male.
I think it's morally different to download a book or to download a movie.

Assume identities? roles? new roles - the algorithm writer for book recommendation/ the server manager

Leads for discussion after questions are asked:
Can you describe the books in your home? What books do you have more, and what books you don't have?

Documentation Method

Goal: To gather preliminary schemes, outputs during the event, feedbacks for the publication Method: Recording the workshop using voice recording

!! The "data", the answers are not that important, is the discussion we want to document and find worth to keep.

Dramaturg:d/Actions

Circulate in the room, just keep walking. If you download files illegally stop walking.
people stop or not
Make other questions
We regroup and continue the discussion. Asking about what they would like to see in these platforms, etc.
We provide a piece of text, articles, inform about a specific case, a law, ...

Geometry for spatial division
Props for posture: chairs, ...

Fourth

pad: https://pad.xpub.nl/p/IFL_13_06_2019

Knowledge in Action

Through role-play, you will perform the activities crucial to the sustenance of libraries. You will interpret and reimagine the actors that take part in knowledge production and distribution, such as the librarian, the researcher, the pirate, the publisher, the reader, the writer, the student, the copyist, the printer.

The workshop consists of three activities where different scenarios shift your accustomed perspective to start common dialogues. Put yourselves in the shoes of the librarian, imagine together a reading space, and contest the morality of knowledge proprietization.

Fifth (last one?)

KNOWLEDGE IN ACTION

Welcome, everyone. Since our workshop is hosted in Leeszaal, we can explain how our workshop is connected to Leeszaal. We were interested in the hidden processes that libraries go through, such as the selection of books, their categorization, the organization of the shelves. With these questions in mind, we interviewed Ronny and Laura, who are volunteer librarians at Leeszaal. They generously introduced to us the basics of how Leeszaal operates. Leeszaal is a particular reading room here in the Rotterdam West as it stands between a community center and library.

We were surprised by the number of books that travel in and out of this place, the flexibility of not having to catalog incoming books to fullest details. For example, a looser notion of a category is used here, compared to research libraries. It made sense since Leeszaal is for the flow of the books. The meaning of what a library is, who does it serve, became clearer and broader to us. From illegal libraries that try to offer everything they can put their hands on, to particular curated content or personal reading lists, the circulation of knowledge can occur in different forms.

This workshop consists of three activities of role-play sessions. Through role-play, you will perform the activities crucial to the sustenance of libraries. You will interpret and reimagine the actors that take part in knowledge production and distribution, such as the librarian, the researcher, the pirate, the publisher, the reader, the writer, the student, the copyist, the printer.

The activities embed you in different scenarios to shift your accustomed perspective to start common dialogues. Put yourselves in the shoes of the librarian, imagine together a reading space, and contest the morality of knowledge proprietization.

ONE — Librarian's Choice

A librarian is challenged with the task of choosing books from the large amounts that come to the library regularly. Before any categorization, the destiny of the book is determined: to keep or to throw away. In this activity, we ask you to represent the librarian and make choices like one. When we perform these processes of selection we understand how one's understanding of what should be displayed influences knowledge circulation.

In this first activity, you are assigned to the role of the librarian, please walk around bookshelves in Leeszaal and select a book. (you have a few minutes to decide)

(Group gathered) Now, we will ask you to decide in a group which half of the books to keep, which to throw away. Remember that you are a librarian, try to think outside your personal preference.

We will give you a scenario:

Decide on what books to keep/throw away for a shadow library.
Decide on what books to keep/throw away for a research university.

Did anything change?

As a third action, you decide now over book categories. We provide 10 categories from Leeszaal, the group should decide on 5 to keep, 5 to throw away.

Duurzaamheid Milieu - Sustainability Environment
Religion Spirituality
Rights
Medical
Humour
Female feminism
Regional novels / Romanticism
Nations
Philosophy
Children's books

We will give you a scenario:

Leeszaal Library

TWO — Ideal Library

When we use libraries we usually desire a certain service and expect specific behaviors. However, the creation of shadow libraries has changed a lot of predefined ideas: you don't need the authorization to read, you don't need to be in a quiet room, maybe you don't need a librarian. In this activity, the participants are asked to imagine new places and to eradicate preconceived ideas about these places. By doing so, we can conceptualize a future for libraries, where books, digital files, and other spaces come together and stay relevant for us.

Think now as a user, the reader, the library goer. The goal is to create our collective ideal library. We provide cards and ask you to:

Write three categories of books/files you would like to have.
Think about spaces. (space for yourself, space for collective reading, space in transit...)
Imagine a scope of audiences (do you want to make it a safe space? invitation only? membership? radical openness? )
Redesign the services (how does the library provide books? does it allow scanning? do you want a librarian? or a robot to organize the shelves? e.g. in Leeszaal people can have the books forever, and in traditional libraries, you need to return them in due time)

You should all think about the organization of the categories and organization of the space. What books/spaces are near what?

THREE — Discussion in the Library

During the previous two activities, we become familiar with how do current libraries operate, and how may we imagine ideal libraries. The following activity takes you to a discussion that revolves the current phenomenon of the shadow libraries and open access, as a site for reorganizing of knowledge distribution. In this activity, you'll be assigned to roles that play a part in academic resources circulation. The discussion aims to map out relationships between these players, acknowledge friction and seek collaboration.

Choose a role/character. (we give badges with names, cards with quotes and explanation of each role)
Take some time to read the quotes and familiarize with your character. (five minutes to prepare)
We provide a case.
Start the discussion with a round of introductions: who are you, what do you defend? (three minutes)
You should defend your character's best interests. Make use of the quotes if you want, but feel free to improvise.

CASE 1: Ming recently graduated from a Chinese University, so she lost access to her university resources. Should she make a way to pay the expensive academic journal database or use shadow libraries instead? Speak from the best interest of the roles you have selected and interpret the scenario.

CASE 2: A researcher just made significant discoveries in a particular field and would like to make the work available to as many people as possible. Speak from the best interest of the roles you have selected and interpret the scenario.

pad: https://pad.xpub.nl/p/BR_17_06_2019

Interview with Leeszaal librarians Laura and Ronny

transcription: https://pad.xpub.nl/p/IFL_2019-06-04-selection-transcription
editing: https://pad.xpub.nl/p/Iibrarian_interview

Introduction

We were interested in the hidden processes that libraries go through, such as the selection of books, their categorization, the organization of the shelves. With these questions in mind, we interviewed Ronny and Laura, who are volunteer librarians at Leeszaal. They generously introduced to us the basics of how Leeszaal operates. Leeszaal is a particular reading room here in the Rotterdam West as it stands between a community center and library. We were surprised by the number of books that travel in and out of this place, the flexibility of not having to catalog incoming books to fullest details. For example, a looser notion of a category is used here, compared to research libraries. The meaning of what a library is, who does it serve, became clearer and broader to us. From illegal libraries that try to offer everything they can put their hands on, to particular curated content or personal reading lists, the circulation of knowledge can occur in different forms.

XPUB: Could you introduce yourself and tell us what you do in Leeszaal?

Ronny: Yes. My name is Ronny, I am 32 years old. I've been volunteering here for almost three and a half years. I am part of the books team, which receives books on a weekly basis. We receive books that are donated in boxes. They come in sometimes thirty boxes per week, sometimes ten boxes. They need to be sorted into categories afterward. I studied at Haifa University in Israel and I worked a bit in the library there but now I work in Rotterdam School of Management. Although it's not related to libraries it is related to education, so I like the combination. My father is Dutch and it was our dream to come back to the Netherlands so when it was economically possible, we came. Laura: I work in a library but I didn’t study library science. I studied classical languages, Greek and Latin, but I've been working in a library for 15 years now.

XPUB: Is Leeszaal a reading room, or do you call it a library?
Laura: It's a volunteer library, but there are differences with normal libraries. It's kind of unique concept.
Laura: It's unique because the books are free, you don't have to be a member of the Leeszaal. You can just walk in, take a book and walk out. We don't ask your name, we don't ask you to show us which books you are going to take.
Ronny: And you don't have to bring them back. You can choose to bring them back or bring something else.

XPUB: Do people bring the books back?
Ronny: Not usually. But sometimes they do.

XPUB: Where do the books in Leeszaal come from?
Laura: Most books come from normal people, people from Rotterdam. Sometimes, when someone dies, his or her books come here. Most of the time the books are just from people who are not going to read them anymore and they don't like the idea of throwing away books as garbage.
Ronny: For example, if the kids are grown, the parents give away books that are no longer suitable for them.
Laura: We have to sort everything that comes in here.

XPUB: What would be the normal path for a book after arriving in Leeszaal?
Ronny: Laura comes in three times per week to sort the books that arrive into categories.
Laura: The first step is to decide if will we keep the book or not. Statistically, we filter out half of the donation. This happens because they are too old, too dirty, or because it's a title that we have ten times already. So there are lot of reasons to throw book away.
Ronny: For the books, we don't want we have containers back here, and there’s a company that comes and recycle them. Sometimes twice a week, sometimes once a week. It's really a lot of books!

XPUB: Do you see annotations often? Would that be a reason to not keep a book?
Laura: Yeah, for me that can be a problem. If there are all kind of colors on the page, or everything is written, ... I don't think I will keep it.

XPUB: Do you often receive repetitive titles; such as Harry Pthe otter? What do you do with them?
Laura: Yes, in the case of Harry Potter we will keep because they will also be picked up quickly. Some books are less popular and are brought here really often. For example the gift books, which you get for free when you buy a book during the book week. Look, for example, we have here one that it's from the yearly book fair and came in for free when you purchase a book. Lots of people have such books. And they don't even read them. We can't keep all of these books.
Ronny: Or those that are popular during the 90s, 80s, some of them we still keep, but if we get like ten copies of the same one then, it's not necessary. They are not popular anymore.

XPUB: Do you usually see people wanting certain books from a certain category? Is there a high demand for particular categories?
Laura: Philosophy, everyone seems to like philosophy!
Ronny: And psychology and art, religion sometimes.

XPUB: Is there the case where these books have more donations as well?
Laura: No. Sometimes people keep asking for a book and we don’t have anything left on the shelves.

XPUB: What can you tell us about the organization of the shelves?
Laura: The novels are in alphabetical order.
Ronny: The English novels as well, but not the rest. This such a small collection that you can see within 10 minutes if we have something you want. The time that we would invest in alphabetization it is not worth it. We also don’t have a catalog, it would take us so much time it becomes impossible. Laura: Yes, in some weeks we receive over a thousand books.
Ronny: It takes out all the fun if you have to worry about cataloging.

XPUB: Can you tell us a bit about what are the visitors like? Who comes here?
Ronny: Everybody. It's young families, old people, middle-aged people, adults, Dutch, and foreigners if they know about this place. Sometimes groups come here from other cities in the Netherlands, sometimes teachers with students.
Laura: And homeless people. They don't come here for the books but to have a place to sit, that's also ok. If they behave alright.

XPUB: What is allowed in this space? Is it possible to copy the books?
Ronny: We don't have photocopy machines, only computers at the aisle for public use.
Ronny and Laura: We have rules like no alcohol, and people should behave themselves. For each category, we have rules for how many books you can take per day. So nobody will come with a container and take 50 books. Because that is not the intention. Just respect each other and listen to the volunteers, and don't make too much noise.

XPUB: What is the role of Leeszaal, does it go beyond the books? We saw that you have a full agenda of workshops and other activities.
Ronny: It's something between a community center and library, maybe, you could say. Because of all the activities. And there is also a Dutch lesson.
Laura: Yes, Cafe NL.
Ronny: There are language related events on a weekly basis, also in the evenings there are some music events or cultural events. Each time it's something else. Every Thursday evening there is something with dinner. The intention is to attract people from different backgrounds, to be wide.

XPUB: We also saw Linux presentation day.
Ronny and Laura: That's twice a year.

XPUB: Is it very often that people approach Leeszaal with a project?
Ronny: There are some projects sometimes, it is possible. If people are interested they talk to the volunteers. Usually, it's possible. The room where we are now stores books, but is also used for other projects. Sometimes we want to make a full space with books about cats. So we collect them for a few months, we put them in boxes and we think about a day when we can display them, and then we do it. So this room is also for these projects. The projects happen at least once a month.
Laura: As often as we want to.
Ronny: When we have a good idea to begin to pay more attention to cat books, or books about Dante, and we start to put them aside. We put the books on a shelf where they can see it more easily, to attract attention, to show that we try our best.

XPUB: The cat’s books, did it happen?
Laura: Yes! Twice. People really like it.

XPUB: How do you think of librarians being a gendered role?
Biyi: I’m really curious because my grandmother studied biology and then, because of life circumstances, 5 or 10 years before her retirement, she became a librarian and I started to become more aware of this gender role of the female librarian.
Ronny: In Haifa University most of the students were women but also some men.
Biyi: More of the people who chose to study librarian sciences?
Ronny: Yes, it’s more a feminine profession.

XPUB: Do you have many volunteers working here?
Laura: We have over 100 volunteers now.

XPUB: Thank you! That's all of our questions.

This interview has been edited for content.

Interview with Dubravka Sekulić

Introduction

The different reactions from our workshop in Leeszaal leads to new questions and discussions. New input came from ourselves while preparing the activities, from our colleagues and from the participants of the workshop. When we had the opportunity to interview Dubravka Sekulić, we knew it would be valuable to understand her perspective on the topics we have been discussing. Dubravka had been involved closely with the past editions of Interfacing the Law in 2017 and 2018, with contributions in workshop and presentations on the topic of extra-legal libraries.

Dubravka Sekulić is an architect, writer, and researcher focusing on the topics of the transformation of contemporary cities, at the nexus between the production of space, laws, and economy. She is an assistant professor at the IZK Institute for Contemporary Art, TU Graz (since September 2016), after spending three years as a PhD fellow at the Institute for History and Theory of Architecture, ETH Zürich, Switzerland. She is an amateur-librarian in Public library/Memory of the World, a real-time catalog of shared libraries through Calibre.

XPUB: In the article "On Knowledge and 'Stealing'", you described yourself as "amateur librarian" at Public Library/Memory of the World. We are curious about what you do there, and what you share there.

Dubravka: My ability to access to content contributed to my formation as a person. I started studying architecture in Belgrade in 1999, 20 years ago, just after the wars of the 90s were finishing. The internet was in its beginning and it was not necessarily a place where you could find all the books. It was really difficult to access files through the library too. For example, the library in the faculty of architecture could get the information that there was this really important book called S, M, L, XL published in 1995, but the school only bought it for the library in 2008.

At this time I was interested in research and theory, so spontaneously I started trying to gather as much literature as possible. If I was interested in this, other people could also be interested, so I started acquring books and photocopying them, constantly sharing them with people. When I wanted to research issues around architecture and feminisim, there was nothing I could find in the academia. The only way to get books was to ask a friend to bring some from another friend in London, so I could photocopy them in Belgrade. Then I would photocopy them for my friends and eventually digitise everything with a flatbed scanner. However, I still needed a device to share, it wasn't yet the time when you could easily attach a PDF and share it online. In 2005 or 2006 when I saw Aaaaarg for the first time, the online shadow library, I remember how happy I was, thinking that finally I had a place to upload and share. But this was never something I was thinking about as a practice in itself.

During this process, I realized that the issue of accessing knowledge was not neccessarily just problematic for me as I come from the periphery, but also present in affluent societies. Besides having access, bringing knowledge from the shadow into light is essential. I often now digitise books which are related to critical space and feminism, because this knowledge has been systematically produced outside, or from the outskirts of academia; it has never been integrated properly as a core. I consciously started to find books which are difficult to reach, and I make them accessible as an intervention. You can call it a feminist intervention in the field of knowledge production in architecture. In this way, Memory of the World becomes really useful to share this content.

XPUB: How did you discover Memory of the World?

Dubravka: There is a network of several situations that led to Memory of the World. The founder of Memory of the World is Marcell Mars, mostly together with Tomislav Madek. Marcell and I were at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht as researchers at the time of the first official outing of Public Library/Memory of the World. This is the moment when Gigapedia, which is something like pre-LibraryGenesis, disappeared and everyone at Jan van Eyck was horrified.

During this time I had spent over a year sitting with my hard drive containing 15 years of articles published by the New Left Review. It is an important new left organization and intellectual production from the UK after the 2nd World War. These files were generically named, I was constantly struggling to organize folders and trying to make this content operational. Then I discovered Calibre, a free software program for cataloging books. Slowly my saved content went from a bunch of folders with a lot of interesting articles, but that was too difficult to manage, to a structured format. While I was organizing I was also emailing people who could be interested in the articles, especially people at the Jan van Eyck knowing the people's areas of research.

While I was doing that, Marcell was thinking about how to infrastructurally support the processes of exchange as a programmer. He was thinking about how the infrastructure could work, to supplement platforms like Aaaaarg and Monoskop which already existed. It is important to have more than one entity because they are fragile and might disappear. In 2012, Public Library was initiated when Marcell was invited by Luka Prinčič to curate a HAIP Festival in what used to be Kiberpipa in Ljubljana. The space was transformed into a public library and people interested in this kind of projects were also invited: Aaaaarg, Monoskop, 0xdb.org, and textz.com, which Sebastian Lütgert created and was taken down under the request of Theodore Adorno Foundation.

Memory of the World, in my opinion, has a triple role. First, it is developed as an infrastructure that allows people to share. Second, through a series of events, is bringing together "shadow librarians", and establishing a framework of thinking together to articulate certain positions. "In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub" is one of such articulations. Thirdly, is doing what I like to call tacticalization. That is to gather together as much as possible and think targetly which content is excluded and how to bring it back and give it a spotlight. This is considered as an activation. There are several projects that were done, either as a Public Library/ Memory of the World project or as off initiatives. Tactical digitization is not only to digitize analog books and make them digitally available, process them inside a curatorial framework, in which certain content is put in relation to another, and you deliberately make certain content available. For me, the curatorial framework is really important while focusing on issues about gender, class, and race. Mostly, issues of feminism and race in relation to space.

Other project I find worth mentioning is the Archive of Humanistic Textual Production in Yugoslavia, which is a response to the genocide of books that happened when the war with Croatia started. A lot of books related to Yugoslavia's anti-fascist struggle and socialist self-management printed in Serbia and non-Croatian part of Yugoslavia were purged out of the libraries. We worked with the curatorial collective WHW from Zagreb in the space Galerija Nova. There was an event called The Written Notes where people salvaged these books from dumps and digitized them to Memory of the World. This is a tactical way of using Memory of the World, to make certain issues visible - incarceration and right-wing nationalistic turns.

Memory of the World helps me to to articulate the topic of knowledge production when I teach in the architecture school, to address these issues of whose knowledge space is considered as outside of the norm what is considered as canonical and what is not canonical, and how we can change these dynamics and how we can recognize these dynamics. Because I am part of a lot of conversations which are dealing with the issue, trying to rethink curriculum and syllabus in architecture field, I was able to use the fact that I am an amateur librarian to not only be a part of these initiatives but also use Memory of the World as a proper library where you actually have access to underrepresented knowledge.

XPUB: How do librarianships and partnerships happen? How did the project “Herman’s Library” start?

Dubravka: Certain projects happened as exhibitions and gatherings. For example, the project Public Library, its conferences and exhibitions are a reunion of people trying to articulate the discourse around what we are doing and how we are addressing and positioning of our practices.

For Herman's Library in Memory of the World, Jackie Sammel had a project called The house that Herman built. She asked Herman Wallace, a prisoner in solitary confinement and the founder Black Panther Chapter in Angola Prison, what would be his ideal house. Part of that was also about the books that shaped his life. Herman's Library is not only a collection of books or an intellectual portrait but also points to what radicalizes and subjectivizes a prisoner of solitary confinement in one of the harshest penitentiaries. The library was actually acquired when Jackie was a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart, Germany) and you could visit Herman's library there.

Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak were also fellows at the Akademie Schloss Solitude. When Tomislav was there, he built The Public Library scanner to digitize books. Soon it became obvious that Herman's library had to be digitized and not to be only accessible when you were visiting Stuttgart or when Jackie was doing exhibitions and traveling with the books. Having Herman's library digitized also opens up the discussion about the gatekeepers of knowledge and access to certain information.

This project also helped me think on how to offer people tools that allow them to interpret the position in which they are, I know this sounds super ambitious. I really like the proposal of James Bridle's “The New Dark Age” that we are moving to a new dark age. A long time ago people didn’t have interpretative tools to understand what was happening, they would see “thunder” and think “god”. There was no physics to explain the phenomenon. Nowadays the computational logic is influencing a lot of our everyday lives but is too difficult to understand how that logic really works. We are moving to what he calls the new dark age.

In this way, I’m really interested in using Memory of the World, or Aaaaarg, or any of these digital archives, to address this issue: what is useful knowledge for people to understand what surrounds them? Or for example, what can help to understand the politics of knowledge distribution.

XPUB: We have been talking a lot about digital libraries. What are your thoughts on physical libraries?

Dubravka: I think digital libraries should never be seen as a replacement for physical libraries. Physical libraries as spacial infrastructures in the city are incredibly valuable and they should be understood as public libraries and never just as containers for books.

Take for example the Carnegie library in the US: through the philanthropic work of Andrew Carnegie, thousands of public libraries in the US and around the world were developed. Carnegie libraries were built in neoclassical style and then reworked to fit into a certain location. If you look into that project, you will see that there was always a room for reading stories to children. It's interesting because it was never just about books. As Fred Moten and Stefano Harney say: text is a social space, we can meet in text together.

For me, the XPUB program reflects this way of thinking. Coming here year after year has been really important because much more than discussing how do you digitize and how do you make accessible certain texts, this program is also about thinking about what happens when this becomes a practice. The question of annotating, reading together, organizing and structuring becomes as important as having a bunch of files.

XPUB: Will there ever be a time when we don’t need shadow libraries?

Dubravka: I don’t think so. In a way, every process of archiving and building a certain collection is also a process of exclusion. Even in my case, with my library in Memory of the World, I have a kind of structure in power. When I tag texts as “race”, “space”, “gender” I'm making a personal decision. For example, I don’t want to have in my collection a Garrett Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons. I don’t want to have a text which is pseudo-science that has caused so much harm and which was written by person who was classified as a white supremacist, no matter how much this is still considered the text that we need to address. Of course, you can say that politically my decision to not have this article is close to some ethos around his own project but this process is how every archive works. Every shadow library also creates a shadow, there will always be some content that is left out, and that content needs to find its place. For me is really important to create a situation where people using shadow libraries are not doing this just as consumers. Users don't necessarily need to digitize books, upload or organize content, but they should be aware that using shadow libraries is not just a convenience.

Although I don’t think online repositories will ever disappear, this doesn’t mean Memory of the World will exist forever. Certain projects will change in relation to what are the geopolitical forces shaping knowledge production. The tendency within academic publishing, and some countries, of supporting open access publishing means that shadow libraries won’t necessarily be as important in ten years. Kenneth Goldsmith, founder of the UbuWeb says “If you like it, download it”. Making the physical copy of things that tend to disappear from the internet is essential.

It is also interesting to think of thresholds. Is Memory of the World already too big as a repository in order to work? The functionality to allow creating collections, reading lists and discussions is something I feel Memory of the World as an infrastructural project lacks. Besides just giving plain access, it is also valuable to allow contextualization. This is the reason why I’m interested in taking part in conversations about building alternative syllabus and reading lists within and outside academia, which allows people to know where to find things. If you go to the “commons” tag in Memory of the World you still don’t know where to start. The different levels of activations transform these bodies of texts in a library. A library always has a librarian, where you can ask “I’m interested in this, what can I read?” or “I’m going on holidays, what can I read that won’t make me depressed or feeling like the world is burning?”.

XPUB: Can different libraries provide different levels of activation?

Dubravka: Yes, for example, the diverse named libraries of Memory of the World are rather different. Some of them like Herman’s library really have a face and an origin, some are more cumulative libraries that are growing a lot and create the largest volume, few of them are really personal. Mine is also personal, as is mirroring what I have on my computer. People don’t need to have a digital library to be a little bit of a librarian. People have always been doing this, recommending books to their friends, passing around hard-drives, books, etc.

Accessibility is less and less of a problem, even on twitter people are sharing institutional access with each other. The next step is to figure out the different activations as a collective process. When databases go over a certain threshold, then filters, readers, recommendations become really important to make them legible.

XPUB: In the beginning, you were talking about getting books from different parts of the world. Was it obvious the various degrees of access?

Dubravka: West is much more accustomed to having access to everything but of course there are asymmetries also inside Western countries, with some universities being much bigger and more powerful.

Sometimes this fake feeling of accessibility can prevent people from understanding how actually difficult is the struggle for other people. If you are working in a big university you really don’t notice how much each article is costing because you are using a subscription like JSTORE. There is a huge asymmetry of who has access, but there’s also an asymmetry on who understands where is the access and why this is happening.

Part of me being a teacher is also about creating a setup where students can subjectivate themselves in relation to the process of studying, their future professions, the process of knowledge production, to get out of this idea that things exist because they exist. To address the issues is really important.

XPUB: Thank you!

*This interview has been edited for content.