How Do We Library That?

From XPUB & Lens-Based wiki



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