User:Simon/Trim4/Motivation

Questions from Aymeric:

How do you intend to make it public? (relates to formats, medium, and techniques/strategies of disseminations that you are currently exploring)
The library is already public, in that it exists and its existence has been published in the form of word-of-mouth, posters and flyers. A similar concern is how to make it private to ensure its survival, and I expect that both of these interests (making it public & private) will guide the development of the library. Locality is important, in that the library is only available (in physical and digital form) locally. This is not only for the purposes of survival, but also because the library reinforces the sociability of a particular public at a particular place and time.

How/why do you intend to create a public for it? (relates to intention, purposes, urgency and contemporary relevance)
Libraries produce sociability; this is evidenced in the texts that are available to be borrowed read and discussed, in the social spaces that replace the spaces that books occupied as collections are digital, in the forums and messageboards that some pirate libraries offer. However, this is threatened by proprietorial publishing interests which exclude readers from the knowledge commons with paywalls, top-down classification and cataloguing methods, and legality of authorship, which defines authorship as not only authority on a subject, but also sees knowledge as private property. The ruling in the court case Elsevier et. al vs Alexandra Elbakyan shows a priveledging of one public interest over another; the interest for individuals to profit from knowledge production trumps the interest for knowledge to be freely distributed for the common good. As a response to this current state of affairs, I aim to create a diversity of form and representation in an effort to challenge standards that exclude communities from the knowledge commons by more closely associating readers (rather than authors or publishers) with texts.