How Do We Library That?

Tasks of the Contingent Librarian (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)
The digital bootleg library
Jumbie Library, Trinidad & Tobago
Leeszaal Rotterdam West

Background

Libraries are complex social infrastructures. It's difficult to describe them without speaking in the generic plural "libraries", or specific singular "a library/the library"; as if they were all the same. Universalisms won't help in understanding what is situated about specific libraries, what makes them particular and important to their publics. For most of you reading this text, the word "library" could conjure up images of a public space and system, built on values of open access to knowledge. You may know of one that has closed recently, or been replaced by proprietory self-service software, or perhaps even an open-source framework.

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

Special Issue 19

What is the minimally viable library?
What are its parts?
On which points does the library diverge, or converge?
When do texts become new?
How to sustain a library?

We will begin with searching for proposals for important questions around how we "do" libraries together. We will question indices and indexical attitudes that point toward universalisms, and discover in the process our library-in-the-making.

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". It is clear that what we need is to understand "how to offer people tools that allow them to interpret the position in which they are".

Libraries as:

distribution networks
sets of practices
sites of cultural literacy
sites of production
sites of learning
social spaces of text

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?".

Schedule

One: Tasks of the Contingent Librarian

Monday, September 19th, 2022

11:00-17:30 Introduction to the Special Issue (with Simon)

Pad:

Including:

"A game of cards": 52 cards on the table (e.g. bootlegging, indexing, scanning, reading, technologizing the word etc) Tasks of the Contingent Librarian
Choose a card that matches your curiosities and/or interests
Exchange a card with someone else, describing how you relate to the card
Exchange a card, relate that relation to someone else

Make a new card, what information does it need?

Tuesday, September 20th, 2022

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

Pad:

Wednesday September 21st, 2022

11:00-18:00 Introduction to Methods with Steve

Two: Print Screen

Monday, September 26th, 2022

Pad:

Tuesday, September 20th, 2022

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

Pad:

Wednesday September 21st, 2022

11:00-18:00 Methods with Steve

Three: Text, TBC

Monday, October 3rd, 2022

Pad:

Tuesday, September 20th, 2022

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

Pad:

Wednesday September 21st, 2022

11:00-18:00 Methods with Steve

Four: Scribes Getting Personal ☞

Monday, October 10th, 2022

Pad:

Tuesday, September 20th, 2022

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

Pad:

Wednesday September 21st, 2022

11:00-18:00 Methods with Steve

Five: Do e-books dream of electronic spreadsheets?

Monday, October 17th, 2022

Pad:

Monday, December 12th, 2022

Pad:

Tuesday, September 20th, 2022

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

Pad:

Wednesday September 21st, 2022

11:00-18:00 Methods with Steve