How Do We Library That?: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 14:10, 5 September 2022

Background

Libraries do much more than simply give access to knowledge; they produce sociality. The sharing of texts is a fundamentally social practice, bringing readers, writers and editors together in an exchange of positions, ideas, knowledge and know-how. So, libraries are more than just collections of texts, or the place in which they are kept. They are places where many actions are performed, including reading together, annotating, organising and structuring.

We will begin with searching for proposals that answer important questions around how we do libraries. Researcher and architect Dubravka Sekulić asks, "what is useful knowledge for people to understand what surrounds them? Or for example, what can help to understand the politics of knowledge distribution".

Special Issue 19

Rather than looking only at what a library stores, we will also discover what it produces. We will consider collections as not only comprised of things, but also people and actions.

In other words, we will attempt to collectively and individually answer the question "How do we library that?", approaching a particular, situated library-in-the-making as a set of collective actions that sustain it.

Schedule

Week 1:

Monday, September 19th, 2022

11:00-13:00 Introducing SI19

14:00-17:30 Introduction to Prototyping

Tuesday, September 20th, 2022

11:00-18:00 Prototyping with Manetta & Joseph

Week 2

Monday, September 26th, 2022

Week 3

Monday, October 3rd, 2022

Week 4

Monday, October 10th, 2022

Week 5

Monday, October 17th, 2022

Week 6

Autumn Vacation

Week 7

Monday, October 31st, 2022

Week 8

Monday, November 7th, 2022

Week 9

Monday, November 14th, 2022

Week 10

Monday, November 21st, 2022

Week 11

Monday, November 28th, 2022

Week 12

Monday, December 5th, 2022

Week 13

Monday, December 12th, 2022

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 == Background ==
-Libraries do much more than simply give access to knowledge; they produce sociality. The sharing of texts is a fundamentally social practice, bringing readers, writers and editors together in an exchange of positions, ideas, knowledge and know-how. So, a library is more than a collection, or the place it is kept, it is also the readers' act of collecting and moments to share texts.
+Libraries do much more than simply give access to knowledge; they produce sociality. The sharing of texts is a fundamentally social practice, bringing readers, writers and editors together in an exchange of positions, ideas, knowledge and know-how. So, libraries are more than just collections of texts, or the place in which they are kept. They are places where many actions are performed, including reading together, annotating, organising and structuring.
-Despite all this, the 19th century dream of the public library as a knowledge commons driven by social practices is dying. Public libraries continue to close at an alarming rate, only to be replaced by self-service models where there is no librarian and reduced access to physical library spaces.
+We will begin with searching for proposals that answer important questions around how we ''do'' libraries. Researcher and architect Dubravka Sekulić asks, "what is useful knowledge for people to understand what surrounds them? Or for example, what can help to understand the politics of knowledge distribution".
-In a 2014 interview, David Pearson, then Director of Culture, Heritage and Libraries at the City of London Corporation acknowledged that the core idea of a public library as "a place where a collection of books is available to borrow... is ultimately, a failing business model".[1] Pearson, a senior librarian and author of Books as History: The importance of books beyond their texts (2008), worries at the incursion of a corporate logic into public space; one that sees public services as businesses and libraries as simply places to keep books and files.
-In a 2019 interview Dubravka Sekulić, architect, researcher and a librarian of the Memory of the World[2] project, vents her frustration at the commonly-held perception of physical libraries as "containers for books".[3] For Sekulić, this disregards the importance of physical libraries as places where the practices of reading together, annotating, organising and structuring are performed. She calls for ambitious responses to address the issue of "what is useful knowledge for people to understand what surrounds them? Or for example, what can help to understand the politics of knowledge distribution".[4]
 == Special Issue 19 ==