How Do We Library That?
The digital bootleg library
Tasks of the Contingent Librarian cards, published by de Appel (2020)
Making a Common Index Zine at the Hold and Release Partyline (2022)
k!words Conversation Map from Keleketla! Library (2021)
A moment for Temporary Indexing at Varia (2021)
Jumbie Library, Port of Spain, Trinidad & Tobago
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.
Despite this, public libraries continue to close all over the world, replaced by self-service systems where librarians are considered an unnecessary cost. In response, come a radical index of fugitive and shadow libraries to fill the gaps.
Special Issue 19
We will begin with searching for proposals that answer important questions around how we do libraries.
We will question indices and indexical attitudes.
In a 2019 interview, 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". We want to think about "how to offer people tools that allow them to interpret the position in which they are".
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
one
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
two
Monday, September 26th, 2022
three
Monday, October 3rd, 2022
four
Monday, October 10th, 2022
five
Monday, October 17th, 2022
...
Autumn Vacation
six
Monday, October 31st, 2022
seven
Monday, November 7th, 2022
eight
Monday, November 14th, 2022
nine
Monday, November 21st, 2022
ten
Monday, November 28th, 2022
eleven
Monday, December 5th, 2022
twelve
Monday, December 12th, 2022