zarroug in Medak, Mars & WHW 2015
catalog record for this book is available from the
National and University Library in Zagreb under 000907085
With the support of the Creative Europe Programme of the
European Union
ZAGREB • ¶ May • 2015
Public Library
1.
Marcell Mars, Manar Zarroug
& Tomislav Medak
75
Public Library (essay)
2.
Paul Otlet
87
Transformations in the Bibliographical
Apparatus of the Sciences
(Repertory — Classification — Office
of Documentation)
3.
McKenzie Wark
111
Metadata Punk
4.
Tomislav Medak
The Future After the Library
UbuWeb and Monoskop’s Radical Gestures
121
Marcell Mars,
Manar Zarroug
& Tomislav Medak
Public library (essay)
In What Was Revolutionary about the French Revolution? 01 Robert Darnton considers how a complete collapse of the social order (when absolutely
everything — all social values — is turned upside
down) woul
ords Liberté, égalité, fraternité (freedom, equality, brotherhood)04 were built through
03 Ibid.
04 Slogan of the French Republic, France.fr, n.d.,
http://www.france.fr/en/institutions-and-values/slogan
-french-republic.html.
76
M. Mars • M. Zarroug • T. Medak
literacy, new epistemologies, classifications, declarations, standards, reason, and rationality. What first
comes to mind about the revolution will never again
be the return of a planet or a star to the same point
from which it departe
a global infrastructure of universal access to knowledge
for literally every member of society. However, the
08 “Dewey Decimal Classification: 001.”, Dewey.info, 27 October 2014, http://dewey.info/class/001/2009-08/about.en.
78
M. Mars • M. Zarroug • T. Medak
emergence and development of the internet is taking place precisely at the point at which an institutional crisis—one with traumatic and inconceivable
consequences—has also begun.
The internet is a new challenge, creating experienc
.
thebear-review.com/#!free-libraries-for-every-soul/c153g.
12 Alison Flood, “UK Lost More than 200 Libraries in 2012”,
The Guardian, 10 December 2012, http://www.theguardian.
com/books/2012/dec/10/uk-lost-200-libraries-2012.
80
M. Mars • M. Zarroug • T. Medak
ket-based entrepreneurship. Some have even suggested that the public library should become an
open software platform on top of which creative
developers can build app stores13 or Internet cafés
for the poorest, ensuring that they are
its
entire book collection (as of this writing, about fifteen terabytes of data), together with the all metadata
(MySQL dump) and PHP/HTML/Java Script code
for webpages. The most popular earlier reposito15 See http://libgen.org/.
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M. Mars • M. Zarroug • T. Medak
ries, such as Gigapedia (later Library.nu), handled
their upload and maintenance costs by selling advertising space to the pornographic and gambling
industries. Legal action was initiated against them,
and they were closed.16 News of t
of Melvil Dewey, Paul Otlet19 and other
visionary librarians, just as it did before the emergence of the internet.
18 See http://ubu.com/.
19 “Paul Otlet”, Wikipedia, 27 October 2014,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otlet.
84
M. Mars • M. Zarroug • T. Medak
With the emergence of the internet and software
tools such as Calibre and “[let’s share books],”20 librarianship has been given an opportunity, similar to astronomy and the project SETI@home21, to
include thousands of amateur lib
zarroug in WHW 2016
teo
Pasquinelli argues in his critique of “digitalism” and its celebration of the
6
7
8
9
See Brown, Undoing the Demos.
Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space, Verso, London and
New York, 2014.
Marcell Mars, Manar Zarroug, and Tomislav Medak, “Public Library”, in Public Library,
ed. Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak, and What, How & for Whom / WHW, exh. publication, What, How & for Whom / WHW and Multimedia Institute, Zagreb, 2015, p. 78.
See Matteo Pasquinelli, Animal
tion of the Public Library project within an exhibition enlists the host
institution as part of the movement and exerts influence on it by taking
the museum’s public mission seriously and extending it into a grey zone of
10
11
Ibid., p. 29.
Mars, Zarroug, and Medak, “Public Library”, p. 85.
“There is something political in the city air”
291
questionable legality. The defence of the project becomes possible by making the traditional claim of the “autonomy” of art, which is not supposed
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