This publication is realized along with the exhibition
Public Library • 27/5 –13/06 2015 • Gallery Nova • Zagreb
Izdavači / Publishers
Editors
Tomislav Medak • Marcell Mars •
What, How & for Whom / WHW
ISBN 978-953-55951-3-7 [Što, kako i za koga/WHW]
ISBN 978-953-7372-27-9 [Multimedijalni institut]
A Cip 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) would look. Such trauma happens often in
the life of individuals but only rarely on the level
of an entire society.
In 1789 the French had to confront the collapse of
a whole social order—the world that they defined
retrospectively as the Ancien Régime — and to find
some new order in the chaos surrounding them.
They experienced reality as something that could
be destroyed and reconstructed, and they faced
seemingly limitless possibilities, both for good and
evil, for raising a utopia and for falling back into
tyranny.02
The revolution bootstraps itself.
01 Robert H. Darnton, What Was Revolutionary about the
French Revolution? (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press,
1996), 6.
02 Ibid.
Public library (essay)
75
In the dictionaries of the time, the word revolution was said to derive from the verb to revolve and
was defined as “the return of the planet or a star to
the same point from which it parted.” 03 French political vocabulary spread no further than the narrow
circle of the feudal elite in Versailles. The citizens,
revolutionaries, had to invent new words, concepts
… an entire new language in order to describe the
revolution that had taken place.
They began with the vocabulary of time and space.
In the French revolutionary calendar used from 1793
until 1805, time started on 1 Vendémiaire, Year 1, a
date which marked the abolition of the old monarchy on (the Gregorian equivalent) 22 September
1792. With a decree in 1795, the metric system was
adopted. As with the adoption of the new calendar,
this was an attempt to organize space in a rational
and natural way. Gram became a unit of mass.
In Paris, 1,400 streets were given new names.
Every reminder of the tyranny of the monarchy
was erased. The revolutionaries even changed their
names and surnames. Le Roy or Leveque, commonly
used until then, were changed to Le Loi or Liberté.
To address someone, out of respect, with vous was
forbidden by a resolution passed on 24 Brumaire,
Year 2. Vous was replaced with tu. People are equal.
The watchwords 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 departed. Revolution bootstrapped,
revolved, and hermeneutically circularized itself.
Melvil Dewey was born in the state of New York in
1851.05 His thirst for knowledge was found its satisfaction in libraries. His knowledge about how to
gain knowledge was developed by studying libraries.
Grouping books on library shelves according to the
color of the covers, the size and thickness of the spine,
or by title or author’s name did not satisfy Dewey’s
intention to develop appropriate new epistemologies in the service of the production of knowledge
about knowledge. At the age of twenty-four, he had
already published the first of nineteen editions of
A Classification and Subject Index for Cataloguing
and Arranging the Books and Pamphlets of a Library,06 the classification system that still bears its
author’s name: the Dewey Decimal System. Dewey
had a dream: for his twenty-first birthday he had
announced, “My World Work [will be] Free Schools
and Free Libraries for every soul.”07
05 Richard F. Snow, “Melvil Dewey”, American Heritage 32,
no. 1 (December 1980),
http://www.americanheritage.com/content/melvil-dewey.
06 Melvil Dewey, A Classification and Subject Index for Cataloguing and Arranging the Books and Pamphlets of a
Library (1876), Project Gutenberg e-book 12513 (2004),
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12513/12513-h/12513-h.htm.
07 Snow, “Melvil Dewey”.
Public library (essay)
77
His dream came true. Public Library is an entry
in the catalog of History where a fantastic decimal08
describes a category of phenomenon that—together
with free public education, a free public healthcare,
the scientific method, the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, Wikipedia, and free software, among
others—we, the people, are most proud of.
The public library is a part of these invisible infrastructures that we start to notice only once they
begin to disappear. A utopian dream—about the
place from which every human being will have access to every piece of available knowledge that can
be collected—looked impossible for a long time,
until the egalitarian impetus of social revolutions,
the Enlightment idea of universality of knowledge,
and the expcetional suspenssion of the comercial
barriers to access to knowledge made it possible.
The internet has, as in many other situations, completely changed our expectations and imagination
about what is possible. The dream of a catalogue
of the world — a universal approach to all available
knowledge for every member of society — became
realizable. A question merely of the meeting of
curves on a graph: the point at which the line of
global distribution of personal computers meets
that of the critical mass of people with access to
the internet. Today nobody lacks the imagination
necessary to see public libraries as part of 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 experiences commonly proferred as ‘revolutionary’. Yet, a
true revolution of the internet is the universal access
to all knowledge that it makes possible. However,
unlike the new epistemologies developed during
the French revolution the tendency is to keep the
‘old regime’ (of intellectual property rights, market
concentration and control of access). The new possibilities for classification, development of languages,
invention of epistemologies which the internet poses,
and which might launch off into new orbits from
existing classification systems, are being suppressed.
In fact, the reactionary forces of the ‘old regime’
are staging a ‘Thermidor’ to suppress the public libraries from pursuing their mission. Today public
libraries cannot acquire, cannot even buy digital
books from the world’s largest publishers.09 The
small amount of e-books that they were able to acquire already they must destroy after only twenty-six
lendings.10 Libraries and the principle of universal
09 “American Library Association Open Letter to Publishers on
E-Book Library Lending”, Digital Book World, 24 September
2012, http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2012/americanlibrary-association-open-letter-to-publishers-on-e-booklibrary-lending/.
10 Jeremy Greenfield, “What Is Going On with Library E-Book
Lending?”, Forbes, 22 June 2012, http://www.forbes.com/
sites/jeremygreenfield/2012/06/22/what-is-going-on-withlibrary-e-book-lending/.
Public library (essay)
79
access to all existing knowledge that they embody
are losing, in every possible way, the battle with a
market dominated by new players such as Amazon.
com, Google, and Apple.
In 2012, Canada’s Conservative Party–led government cut financial support for Libraries and
Archives Canada (LAC) by Can$9.6 million, which
resulted in the loss of 400 archivist and librarian
jobs, the shutting down of some of LAC’s internet
pages, and the cancellation of the further purchase
of new books.11 In only three years, from 2010 to
2012, some 10 percent of public libraries were closed
in Great Britain.12
The commodification of knowledge, education,
and schooling (which are the consequences of a
globally harmonized, restrictive legal regime for intellectual property) with neoliberal austerity politics
curtails the possibilities of adapting to new sociotechnological conditions, let alone further development, innovation, or even basic maintenance of
public libraries’ infrastructure.
Public libraries are an endangered institution,
doomed to extinction.
Petit bourgeois denial prevents society from confronting this disturbing insight. As in many other
fields, the only way out offered is innovative mar11 Aideen Doran, “Free Libraries for Every Soul: Dreaming
of the Online Library”, The Bear, March 2014, http://www.
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 only a click
away from the Amazon.com catalog or the Google
search bar. But these proposals overlook, perhaps
deliberately, the fundamental principles of access
upon which the idea of the public library was built.
Those who are well-meaning, intelligent, and
tactfull will try to remind the public of all the many
sides of the phenomenon that the public library is:
major community center, service for the vulnerable,
center of literacy, informal and lifelong learning; a
place where hobbyists, enthusiasts, old and young
meet and share knowledge and skills.14 Fascinating. Unfortunately, for purely tactical reasons, this
reminder to the public does not always contain an
explanation of how these varied effects arise out of
the foundational idea of a public library: universal
access to knowledge for each member of the society produces knowledge, produces knowledge about
knowledge, produces knowledge about knowledge
transfer: the public library produces sociability.
The public library does not need the sort of creative crisis management that wants to propose what
13 David Weinberger, “Library as Platform”, Library Journal,
4 September 2012, http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2012/09/
future-of-libraries/by-david-weinberger/.
14 Shannon Mattern, “Library as Infrastructure”, Design
Observer, 9 June 2014, http://places.designobserver.com/
entryprint.html?entry=38488.
Public library (essay)
81
the library should be transformed into once our society, obsessed with market logic, has made it impossible for the library to perform its main mission. Such
proposals, if they do not insist on universal access
to knowledge for all members, are Trojan horses for
the silent but galloping disappearance of the public
library from the historical stage. Sociability—produced by public libraries, with all the richness of its
various appearances—will be best preserved if we
manage to fight for the values upon which we have
built the public library: universal access to knowledge for each member of our society.
Freedom, equality, and brotherhood need brave librarians practicing civil disobedience.
Library Genesis, aaaaarg.org, Monoskop, UbuWeb
are all examples of fragile knowledge infrastructures
built and maintained by brave librarians practicing
civil disobedience which the world of researchers
in the humanities rely on. These projects are re-inventing the public library in the gap left by today’s
institutions in crisis.
Library Genesis15 is an online repository with over
a million books and is the first project in history to
offer everyone on the Internet free download of 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 the termination of
Gigapedia/Library.nu strongly resonated among
academics and book enthusiasts circles and was
even noted in the mainstream Internet media, just
like other major world events. The decision by Library Genesis to share its resources has resulted
in a network of identical sites (so-called mirrors)
through the development of an entire range of Net
services of metadata exchange and catalog maintenance, thus ensuring an exceptionally resistant
survival architecture.
aaaaarg.org, started by the artist Sean Dockray, is
an online repository with over 50,000 books and
texts. A community of enthusiastic researchers from
critical theory, contemporary art, philosophy, architecture, and other fields in the humanities maintains,
catalogs, annotates, and initiates discussions around
it. It also as a courseware extension to the self-organized education platform The Public School.17
16 Andrew Losowsky, “Library.nu, Book Downloading Site,
Targeted in Injunctions Requested by 17 Publishers,” Huffington Post, 15 February 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.
com/2012/02/15/librarynu-book-downloading-injunction_
n_1280383.html.
17 “The Public School”, The Public School, n.d.,
https://www.thepublicschool.org/.
Public library (essay)
83
UbuWeb18 is the most significant and largest online
archive of avant-garde art; it was initiated and is lead
by conceptual artist Kenneth Goldsmith. UbuWeb,
although still informal, has grown into a relevant
and recognized critical institution of contemporary
art. Artists want to see their work in its catalog and
thus agree to a relationship with UbuWeb that has
no formal contractual obligations.
Monoskop is a wiki for the arts, culture, and media
technology, with a special focus on the avant-garde,
conceptual, and media arts of Eastern and Central
Europe; it was launched by Dušan Barok and others.
In the form of a blog Dušan uploads to Monoskop.
org/log an online catalog of curated titles (at the
moment numbering around 3,000), and, as with
UbuWeb, it is becoming more and more relevant
as an online resource.
Library Genesis, aaaaarg.org, Kenneth Goldsmith,
and Dušan Barok show us that the future of the
public library does not need crisis management,
venture capital, start-up incubators, or outsourcing but simply the freedom to continue extending
the dreams 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.
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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 librarians who will,
together with the experts, build a distributed peerto-peer network to care for the catalog of available
knowledge, because
a public library is:
— free access to books for every member of society
— library catalog
— librarian
With books ready to be shared, meticulously
cataloged, everyone is a librarian.
When everyone is librarian, library is
everywhere.22
❧
20 “Tools”, Memory of the World, n.d.,
https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/tools/.
21 See http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/.
22 “End-to-End Catalog”, Memory of the World, 26 November 2012,
https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/end-to-end-catalog/.
Public library (essay)
85
Paul Otlet
Transformations
in the Bibliographical Apparatus
of the Sciences [1]
Repertory — Classification — Office
of Documentation
1. Because of its length, its extension to all countries,
the profound harm that it has created in everyone’s
life, the War has had, and will continue to have, repercussions for scientific productivity. The hour for
the revision of the old order is about to strike. Forced
by the need for economies of men and money, and
by the necessity of greater productivity in order to
hold out against all the competition, we are going to
have to introduce reforms into each of the branches
of the organisation of science: scientific research, the
preservation of its results, and their wide diffusion.
Everything happens simultaneously and the distinctions that we will introduce here are only to
facilitate our thinking. Always adjacent areas, or
even those that are very distant, exert an influence
on each other. This is why we should recognize the
impetus, growing each day even greater in the organisation of science, of the three great trends of
our times: the power of associations, technological
progress and the democratic orientation of institutions. We would like here to draw attention to some
of their consequences for the book in its capacity
Transformations In The Bibliographical
Apparatus Of The Sciences
87
as an instrument for recording what has been discovered and as a necessary means for stimulating
new discoveries.
The Book, the Library in which it is preserved,
and the Catalogue which lists it, have seemed for
a long time as if they had achieved their heights of
perfection or at least were so satisfactory that serious
changes need not be contemplated. This may have
been so up to the end of the last century. But for a
score of years great changes have been occurring
before our very eyes. The increasing production of
books and periodicals has revealed the inadequacy of
older methods. The increasing internationalisation
of science has required workers to extend the range
of their bibliographic investigations. As a result, a
movement has occurred in all countries, especially
Germany, the United States and England, for the
expansion and improvement of libraries and for
an increase in their numbers. Publishers have been
searching for new, more flexible, better-illustrated,
and cheaper forms of publication that are better-coordinated with each other. Cataloguing enterprises
on a vast scale have been carried out, such as the
International Catalogue of Scientific Literature and
the Universal Bibliographic Repertory. [2]
Three facts, three ideas, especially merit study
for they represent something really new which in
the future can give us direction in this area. They
are: The Repertory, Classification and the Office of
Documentation.
•••
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Paul Otlet
2. The Repertory, like the book, has gradually been
increasing in size, and improvements in it suggest
the emergence of something new which will radically modify our traditional ideas.
From the point of view of form, a book can be
defined as a group of pages cut to the same format
and gathered together in such a way as to form a
whole. It was not always so. For a long time the
Book was a roll, a volumen. The substances which
then took the place of paper — papyrus and parchment — were written on continuously from beginning to end. Reading required unrolling. This was
certainly not very practical for the consultation of
particular passages or for writing on the verso. The
codex, which was introduced in the first centuries of
the modern era and which is the basis of our present
book, removed these inconveniences. But its faults
are numerous. It constitutes something completed,
finished, not susceptible of addition. The Periodical
with its successive issues has given science a continuous means of concentrating its results. But, in
its turn, the collections that it forms runs into the
obstacle of disorder. It is impossible to link similar
or connected items; they are added to one another
pell-mell, and research requires handling great masses of heavy paper. Of course indexes are a help and
have led to progress — subject indexes, sometimes
arranged systematically, sometimes analytically,
and indexes of names of persons and places. These
annual indexes are preceded by monthly abstracts
and are followed by general indexes cumulated every
five, ten or twenty-five years. This is progress, but
the Repertory constitutes much greater progress.
Transformations In The Bibliographical
Apparatus Of The Sciences
89
The aim of the Repertory is to detach what the
book amalgamates, to reduce all that is complex to
its elements and to devote a page to each. Pages, here,
are leaves or cards according to the format adopted.
This is the “monographic” principle pushed to its
ultimate conclusion. No more binding or, if it continues to exist, it will become movable, that is to
say, at any moment the cards held fast by a pin or a
connecting rod or any other method of conjunction
can be released. New cards can then be intercalated,
replacing old ones, and a new arrangement made.
The Repertory was born of the Catalogue. In
such a work, the necessity for intercalations was
clear. Nor was there any doubt as to the unitary or
monographic notion: one work, one title; one title,
one card. As a result, registers which listed the same
collections of books for each library but which had
constantly to be re-done as the collections expanded,
have gradually been discarded. This was practical
and justified by experience. But upon reflection one
wonders whether the new techniques might not be
more generally applied.
What is a book, in fact, if not a single continuous line which has initially been cut to the length
of a page and then cut again to the size of a justified
line? Now, this cutting up, this division, is purely
mechanical; it does not correspond to any division
of ideas. The Repertory provides a practical means
of physically dividing the book according to the
intellectual division of ideas.
Thus, the manuscript library catalogue on cards
has been quickly followed by catalogues printed on
cards (American Library Bureau, the Catalogue or
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Paul Otlet
the Library of Congress in Washington) [3]; then by
bibliographies printed on cards (International Institute of Bibliography, Concilium Bibliographicum)
[4]; next, indices of species have been published on
cards (Index Speciorum) [5]. We have moved from
the small card to the large card, the leaf, and have
witnessed compendia abandoning the old form for
the new (Jurisclasseur, or legal digests in card form).
Even the idea of the encyclopedia has taken this
form (Nelson’s Perpetual Cyclopedia [6]).
Theoretically and technically, we now have in
the Repertory a new instrument for analytically or
monographically recording data, ideas, information. The system has been improved by divisionary cards of various shapes and colours, placed in
such a way that they express externally the outline
of the classification being used and reduce search
time to a minimum. It has been improved further
by the possibility of using, by cutting and pasting,
materials that have been printed on large leaves or
even books that have been published without any
thought of repertories. Two copies, the first providing the recto, the second the verso, can supply
all that is necessary. One has gone even further still
and, from the example of statistical machines like
those in use at the Census of Washington (sic) [7],
extrapolated the principle of “selection machines”
which perform mechanical searches in enormous
masses of materials, the machines retaining from
the thousands of cards processed by them only those
related to the question asked.
•••
Transformations In The Bibliographical
Apparatus Of The Sciences
91
3. But such a development, like the Repertory before it, presupposes a classification. This leads us to
examine the second practical idea that is bringing
about the transformation of the book.
Classification plays an enormous role in scientific thought. If one could say that a science was a
well-made language, one could equally assert that
it is a completed classification. Science is made up
of verified facts which are organised in a structure
of systems, hypotheses, theories, laws. If there is
a certain order in things, it is necessary to have it
also in science which reflects and explains nature.
That is why, since the time of Greek thought until
the present, constant efforts have been made to improve classification. These have taken three principal directions: classification studied as an activity
of the mind; the general classification and sequence
of the sciences; the systematization appropriate to
each discipline. The idea of order, class, genus and
species has been studied since Aristotle, in passing
by Porphyrus, by the scholastic philosophers and by
modern logicians. The classification of knowledge
goes back to the Greeks and owes much to the contributions of Bacon and the Renaissance. It was posed
as a distinct and separate problem by D’Alembert
and the Encyclopédie, and by Ampère, Comte, and
Spencer. The recent work of Manouvrier, Durand
de Cros, Goblot, Naville, de la Grasserie, has focussed on various aspects of it. [8] As to systematics,
one can say that this has become the very basis of
the organisation of knowledge as a body of science.
When one has demonstrated the existence of 28 million stars, a million chemical compounds, 300,000
92
Paul Otlet
vegetable species, 200,000 animal species, etc., it is
necessary to have a means, an Ariadne’s thread, of
finding one’s way through the labyrinth formed by
all these objects of study. Because there are sciences of beings as well as sciences of phenomena, and
because they intersect with each other as we better
understand the whole of reality, it is necessary that
this means be used to retrieve both. The state of development of a science is reflected at any given time
by its systematics, just as the general classification
of the sciences reflects the state of development of
the encyclopedia, of the philosophy of knowledge.
The need has been felt, however, for a practical
instrument of classification. The classifications of
which we have just spoken are constantly changing, at least in their detail if not in broad outline. In
practice, such instability, such variability which is
dependent on the moment, on schools of thought
and individuals, is not acceptable. Just as the Repertory had its origin in the catalogue, so practical
classification originated in the Library. Books represent knowledge and it is necessary to arrange them
in collections. Schemes for this have been devised
since the Middle Ages. The elaboration of grand
systems occurred in the 17th and 18th centuries
and some new ones were added in the 19th century. But when bibliography began to emerge as an
autonomous field of study, it soon began to develop
along the lines of the catalogue of an ideal library
comprising the totality of what had been published.
From this to drawing on library classifications was
but a step, and it was taken under certain conditions
which must be stressed.
Transformations In The Bibliographical
Apparatus Of The Sciences
93
Up to the present time, 170 different classifications
have been identified. Now, no cooperation is possible if everyone stays shut up in his own system. It
has been necessary, therefore, to choose a universal
classification and to recommend it as such in the
same way that the French Convention recognized
the necessity of a universal system of weights and
measures. In 1895 the first International Conference
of Bibliography chose the Decimal Classification
and adopted a complete plan for its development. In
1904, the edition of the expanded tables appeared. A
new edition was being prepared when the war broke
out Brussels, headquarters of the International Institute of Bibliography, which was doing this work,
was part of the invaded territory.
In its latest state, the Decimal Classification has
become an instrument of great precision which
can meet many needs. The printed tables contain
33,000 divisions and they have an alphabetical index consisting of about 38,000 words. Learning is
here represented in its entire sweep: the encyclopedia of knowledge. Its principle is very simple. The
empiricism of an alphabetical classification by subject-heading cannot meet the need for organising
and systematizing knowledge. There is scattering;
there is also the difficulty of dealing with the complex expressions which one finds in the modern terminology of disciplines like medicine, technology,
and the social sciences. Above all, it is impossible
to achieve any international cooperation on such
a national basis as language. The Decimal Classification is a vast systematization of knowledge, “the
table of contents of the tables of contents” of all
94
Paul Otlet
treatises. But, as it would be impossible to find a
particular subject’s relative place by reference to
another subject, a system of numbering is needed.
This is decimal, which an example will make clear.
Optical Physiology would be classified thus:
5 th Class
3rd Group
5th Division
7th Sub-division
or 535.7
This number 535.7 is called decimal because all
knowledge is taken as one of which each science is
a fraction and each individual subject is a decimal
subdivided to a lesser or greater degree. For the sake
of abbreviation, the zero of the complete number,
which would be 0.5357, has been suppressed because
the zero would be repeated in front of each number.
The numbers 5, 3, 5, 7 (which one could call five hundred and thirty-five point seven and which could
be arranged in blocks of three as for the telephone,
or in groups of twos) form a single number when
the implied words, “class, group, division and subdivision,” are uttered.
The classification is also called decimal because
all subjects are divided into ten classes, then each
of these into at least ten groups, and each group
into at least ten divisions. All that is needed for the
number 535.7 always to have the same meaning is
to translate the tables into all languages. All that is
needed to deal with future scientific developments
Transformations In The Bibliographical
Apparatus Of The Sciences
95
in optical physiology in all of its ramifications is to
subdivide this number by further decimal numbers
corresponding to the subdivisions of the subject
Finally, all that is needed to ensure that any document or item pertaining to optical physiology finds
its place within the sum total of scientific subjects
is to write this number on it In the alphabetic index
to the tables references are made from each word
to the classification number just as the index of a
book refers to page numbers.
This first remarkable principle of the decimal
classification is generally understood. Its second,
which has been introduced more recently, is less
well known: the combination of various classification numbers whenever there is some utility in expressing a compound or complex heading. In the
social sciences, statistics is 31 and salaries, 331.2. By
a convention these numbers can be joined by the
simple sign : and one may write 31:331.2 statistics
of salaries.01
This indicates a general relationship, but a subject also has its place in space and time. The subject
may be salaries in France limited to a period such as
the 18th century (that is to say, from 1700 to 1799).
01 The first ten divisions are: 0 Generalities, 1 Philosophy, 2
Religion, 3 Social Sciences, 4 Philology, Language, 5 Pure
Sciences, 6 Applied Science, Medicine, 7 Fine Arts, 8 Literature, 9 History and Geography. The Index number 31 is
derived from: 3rd class social sciences, 1st group statistics. The
Index number 331.2 is derived from 3rd class social sciences,
3rd group political economy, 1st division topics about work,
2nd subdivision salaries.
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The sign that characterises division by place being
the parenthesis and that by time quotation marks
or double parentheses, one can write:
33:331.2 (44) «17» statistics — of salaries — in
France — in the 17th century
or ten figures and three signs to indicate, in terms
of the universe of knowledge, four subordinated
headings comprising 42 letters. And all of these
numbers are reversible and can be used for geographic or chronologic classification as well as for
subject classification:
(44) 31:331.2 «17»
France — Statistics — Salaries — 17th Century
«17» (44) 31:331.2
17th Century — France — Statistics — Salaries
The subdivisions of relation and location explained
here, are completed by documentary subdivisions
for the form and the language of the document (for
example, periodical, in Italian), and by functional
subdivisions (for example, in zoology all the divisions by species of animal being subdivided by biological aspects). It follows by virtue of the law of
permutations and combinations that the present
tables of the classification permit the formulation
at will of millions of classification numbers. Just as
arithmetic does not give us all the numbers readymade but rather a means of forming them as we
need them, so the classification gives us the means
Transformations In The Bibliographical
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of creating classification numbers insofar as we have
compound headings that must be translated into a
notation of numbers.
Like chemistry, mathematics and music, bibliography thus has its own extremely simple notations:
numbers. Immediately and without confusion, it
allows us to find a place for each idea, for each thing
and consequently for each book, article, or document and even for each part of a book or document
Thus it allows us to take our bearings in the midst
of the sources of knowledge, just as the system of
geographic coordinates allows us to take our bearings on land or sea.
One may well imagine the usefulness of such a
classification to the Repertory. It has rid us of the
difficulty of not having continuous pagination. Cards
to be intercalated can be placed according to their
class number and the numbering is that of tables
drawn up in advance, once and for all, and maintained with an unvarying meaning. As the classification has a very general use, it constitutes a true
documentary classification which can be used in
various kinds of repertories: bibliographic repertories; catalogue-like repertories of objects, persons,
phenomena; and documentary repertories of files
made up of written or printed materials of all kinds.
The possibility can be envisaged of encyclopedic
repertories in which are registered and integrated
the diverse data of a scientific field and which draw
for this purpose on materials published in periodicals. Let each article, each report, each item of news
henceforth carry a classification number and, automatically, by clipping, encyclopedias on cards can
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be created in which all the results of international
scientific cooperation are brought together at the
same number. This constitutes a profound change
in the technology of the Book, since the repertory
thus formed is simultaneously a constantly up-dated book and a cooperative book in which are found
printed elements produced in all locations.
•••
4. If we can realize the third idea, the Office of Documentation, then reform will be complete. Such an
office is the old library, but adapted to a new function. Hitherto the library has been a museum of
books. Works were preserved in libraries because
they were precious objects. Librarians were keepers.
Such establishments were not organised primarily
for the use of documents. Moreover, their outmoded
regulations if they did not exclude the most modern
forms of publication at least did not admit them.
They have poor collections of journals; collections
of newspapers are nearly nonexistent; photographs,
films, phonograph discs have no place in them, nor
do film negatives, microscopic slides and many other “documents.” The subject catalogue is considered
secondary in the library so long as there is a good
register for administrative purposes. Thus there is
little possibility of developing repertories in the
library, that is to say of taking publications to pieces and redistributing them in a more directly and
quickly accessible form. For want of personnel to
arrange them, there has not even been a place for
the cards that are received already printed.
Transformations In The Bibliographical
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The Office of Documentation, on the contrary, is
conceived of in such a way as to achieve all that is
lacking in the library. Collections of books are the
necessary basis for it, but books, far from being
considered as finished products, are simply materials which must be developed more fully. This
development consists in establishing the connections each individual book has with all of the other
books and forming from them all what might be
called The Universal Book. It is for this that we use
repertories: bibliographic repertories; repertories of
documentary dossiers gathering pamphlets and extracts together by subject; catalogues; chronological
repertories of facts or alphabetical ones of names;
encyclopedic repertories of scientific data, of laws,
of patents, of physical and technical constants, of
statistics, etc. All of these repertories will be set up
according to the method described above and arranged by the same universal classification. As soon
as an organisation to contain these repertories is
created, the Office of Documentation, one may be
sure that what happened to the book when libraries
first opened — scientific publication was regularised
and intensified — will happen to them. Then there
will be good reason for producing in bibliographies,
catalogues, and above all in books and periodicals
themselves, the rational changes which technology and the creative imagination suggest. What is
still an exception today will be common tomorrow.
New possibilities will exist for cooperative work
and for the more effective organisation of science.
•••
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5. Repertory, Classification, Office of Documentation are therefore the three related elements of a
single reform in our methods of registering scientific discoveries and making them available to the
greatest number of people. Already one must speak
less of experiments and uncertain trials than of the
beginning of serious achievement. The International Institute of Bibliography in Brussels constitutes
a vast intellectual cooperative whose members are
becoming more numerous each day. Associations,
scientific establishments, periodical publications,
scientific and technical workers of every kind are
affiliating with it. Its repertories contain millions of
cards. There are sections in several countries02 . But
this was before the War. Since its outbreak, a movement in France, England and the United States has
been emerging everywhere to improve the organisation of the Book. The Office of Documentation has
been suggested as the solution for the requirements
that have been discussed.
It is important that the world of science and
technology should support this movement and
above all that it should endeavour to apply the new
methods to the works which it will be necessary to
re-organise. Among the most important of these is
the International Catalogue of Scientific Literature,
that fine and great work begun at the initiative of the
Royal Society of London. Until now, this work has
02 In France, the Bureau Bibliographique de Paris and great
associations such as the Société pour l’encouragement de
l’industrie nationale, l’Association pour l’avancement des
sciences, etc., are affiliated with it.
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been carried on without relation to other works of
the same kind: it has not recognised the value of a
card repertory or a universal classification. It must
recognise them in the future.03 ❧
03 See Paul Otlet, “La Documentation et I’information au service de I’industrie”, Bulletin de la Société d’encouragement
de l’industrie nationale, June 1917. — La Documentation au
service de l’invention. Euréka, October 1917. — L’Institut
International de Bibliographie, Bibliographie de la France,
21 December 1917. — La Réorganisation du Catalogue international de la littérature scientifique. Revue générale des
sciences, IS February 1918. The publications of the Institute,
especially the expanded tables of the Decimal Classification,
have been deposited at the Bureau Bibliographique de Paris,
44 rue de Rennes at the apartments of the Société de l’encouragement. — See also the report presented by General
Sebert (9] to the Congrès du Génie civil, in March 1918 and
whose conclusions about the creation in Paris of a National
Office of Technical Documentation have been adopted.
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Editor’s Notes
[1] “Transformations operées dans l’appareil bibliographique
des sciences,” Revue scientifique 58 (1918): 236-241.
[2] The International Catalogue of Scientific Literature, an enormous work, was compiled by a Central Bureau under the
sponsorship of the Royal Society from material sent in from
Regional Bureaus around the world. It was published annually beginning in 1902 in 17 parts each corresponding to
a major subject division and comprising one or more volumes. Publication was effectively suspended in 1914. By the
time war broke out, the Universal Bibliographic Repertory
contained over 11 million entries.
[3] For card publication by the Library Bureau and Library of
Congress, see Edith Scott, “The Evolution of Bibliographic
Systems in the United States, 1876–1945” and Editor’s Note
36 to the second paper and Note 5 to the seventh paper in
International Organisation and Dissemination of Knowledge; Selected Essays of Paul Otlet, translated and edited by
W. Boyd Rayward. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1990: 148–156.
[4] Otlet refers to the Concilium Bibliographicum also in Paper
No. 7, “The Reform of National Bibliographies...” in International Organisation and Dissemination of Knowledge; Selected
Essays of Paul Otlet. See also Editor’s Note 5 in that paper
for the major bibliographies published by the Concilium
Bibliographicum.
[5] A possible example of what Otlet is referring to here is the
Gray Herbarium Index. This was “planned to provide cards
for all the names of vascular plant taxa attributable to the
Transformations In The Bibliographical
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Western Hemisphere beginning with the literature of 1886”
(Gray Herbarium Index, Preface, p. iii). Under its first compiler, 20 instalments consisting in all of 28,000 cards were
issued between 1894 and 1903. It has been continued after
that time and was for many years “issued quarterly at the
rate of about 4,000 cards per year.” At the time the cards
were reproduced in a printed catalogue by G. K. Hall in 1968,
there were 85 subscribers to the card sets.
[6] Nelson’s Perpetual Loose-Leaf Encylcopedia was a popular,
12-volume work which went through many editions, its
principle being set down at the beginning of the century.
It was published in binders and the publisher undertook to
supply a certain number of pages of revisions (or renewals)
semi-annually after each edition, the first of which appeared
in 1905. An interesting reference presumably to this work
occurs in a notice, “An Encylcopedia on the Card-Index System,” in the Scientific American 109 (1913): 213. The Berlin
Correspondent of the journal reports a proposal made in
Berlin which contains “an idea, in a sense ... already carried
out in an American loose-leaf encyclopedia, the publishers
of which supply new pages to take the place of those that
are obsolete” (Nelsons, an English firm, set up a New York
branch in 1896. Publication in the U.S. of works to be widely
circulated there was a requirement of the copyright law.)
The reporter observes that the principle suggested “affords
a means of recording all facts at present known as well as
those to be discovered in the future, with the same safety
and ease as though they were registered in our memory, by
providing a universal encyclopedia, incessantly keeping
abreast of the state of human knowledge.” The “bookish”
form of conventional encyclopedias acts against its future
success. “In the case of a mere storehouse of facts the in-
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finitely more mobile form of the card index should however
be adopted, possibly,” the author goes on making a most interesting reference, “in conjunction with Dr. Goldschmidt’s
Microphotographic Library System.” The need for a central
institute, the nature of its work, the advantages of the work
so organised are described in language that is reminiscent
of that of Paul Otlet (see also the papers of Goldschmidt
and Otlet translated in International Organisation and
Dissemination of Knowledge; Selected Essays of Paul Otlet).
[7] These machines were derived from Herman Hollerith’s
punched cards and tabulating machines. Hollerith had
introduced them under contract into the U.S. Bureau of
the Census for the 1890 census. This equipment was later
modified and developed by the Bureau. Hollerith, his invention and his business connections lie at the roots of the
present IBM company. The equipment and its uses in the
census from 1890 to 1910 are briefly described in John H.
Blodgett and Claire K. Schultz, “Herman Hollerith: Data
Processing Pioneer,” American Documentation 20 (1969):
221-226. As they observe, suggesting the accuracy of Otlet’s
extrapolation, “his was not simply a calculating machine,
it performed selective sorting, an operation basic to all information retrieval.”
[8] The history of the classification of knowledge has been treated
in English in detail by E.C. Richardson in his Classification
Theoretical and Practical, the first edition of which appeared
in 1901 and was followed by editions in 1912 and 1930. A
different treatment is given in Robert Flint’s Philosophy as
Scientia Scientarium: a History of the Classification of the
Sciences which appeared in 1904. Neither of these works
deal with Manouvrier, a French anthropologist, or Durand
Transformations In The Bibliographical
Apparatus Of The Sciences
105
de Cros. Joseph-Pierre Durand, sometimes called Durand
de Cros after his birth place, was a French physiologist and
philosopher who died in 1900. In his Traité de documentation,
in the context of his discussion of classification, Otlet refers
to an Essai de taxonomie by Durand published by Alcan. It
seems that this is an error for Aperçus de taxonomie (Alcan,
1899).
[9] General Hippolyte Sebert was President of the Association française pour l’avancement des sciences, and the Société d’encouragement pour l’industrie nationale. He had
been active in the foundation of the Bureau bibliographique
de Paris. For other biographical information about him see
Editor’s Note 9 to Paper no 17, “Henri La Fontaine”, in International Organisation and Dissemination of Knowledge;
Selected Essays of Paul Otlet.
English translation of the Paul Otlet’s text published with the
permission of W. Boyd Rayward. The translation was originally
published as Paul Otlet, “Transformations in the Bibliographical
Apparatus of the Sciences: Repertory–Classification–Office of
Documentation”, in International Organisation and Dissemination of Knowledge; Selected Essays of Paul Otlet, translated and
edited by W. Boyd Rayward, Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1990: 148–156.
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http://aaaaarg.org/
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Metadata Punk
So we won the battle but lost the war. By “we”, I
mean those avant-gardes of the late twentieth century whose mission was to free information from the
property form. It was always a project with certain
nuances and inconsistencies, but over-all it succeeded beyond almost anybody’s wildest dreams. Like
many dreams, it turned into a nightmare in the end,
the one from which we are now trying to awake.
The place to start is with what the situationists
called détournement. The idea was to abolish the
property form in art by taking all of past art and
culture as a commons from which to copy and correct. We see this at work in Guy Debord’s texts and
films. They do not quote from past works, as to do
so acknowledges their value and their ownership.
The elements of détournement are nothing special.
They are raw materials for constructing theories,
narratives, affects of a subjectivity no longer bound
by the property form.
Such a project was recuperated soon enough
back into the art world as “appropriation.” Richard
Prince is the dialectical negation of Guy Debord,
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in that appropriation values both the original fragment and contributes not to a subjectivity outside of
property but rather makes a career as an art world
star for the appropriating artist. Of such dreams is
mediocrity made.
If there was a more promising continuation of
détournement it had little to do with the art world.
Détournement became a social movement in all but
name. Crucially, it involved an advance in tools,
from Napster to Bitorrent and beyond. It enabled
the circulation of many kinds of what Hito Steyerl
calls the poor image. Often low in resolution, these
détourned materials circulated thanks both to the
compression of information but also because of the
addition of information. There might be less data
but there’s added metadata, or data about data, enabling its movement.
Needless to say the old culture industries went
into something of a panic about all this. As I wrote
over ten years ago in A Hacker Manifesto, “information wants to be free but is everywhere in chains.”
It is one of the qualities of information that it is indifferent to the medium that carries it and readily
escapes being bound to things and their properties.
Yet it is also one of its qualities that access to it can
be blocked by what Alexander Galloway calls protocol. The late twentieth century was — among other
things — about the contradictory nature of information. It was a struggle between détournement and
protocol. And protocol nearly won.
The culture industries took both legal and technical steps to strap information once more to fixity
in things and thus to property and scarcity. Inter-
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estingly, those legal steps were not just a question of
pressuring governments to make free information
a crime. It was also a matter of using international
trade agreements as a place outside the scope of de
mocratic oversight to enforce the old rules of property. Here the culture industries join hands with the
drug cartels and other kinds of information-based
industry to limit the free flow of information.
But laws are there to be broken, and so are protocols of restriction such as encryption. These were
only ever delaying tactics, meant to shore up old
monopoly business for a bit longer. The battle to
free information was the battle that the forces of
détournement largely won. Our defeat lay elsewhere.
While the old culture industries tried to put information back into the property form, there were
other kinds of strategy afoot. The winners were not
the old culture industries but what I call the vulture
industries. Their strategy was not to try to stop the
flow of free information but rather to see it as an
environment to be leveraged in the service of creating a new kind of business. “Let the data roam free!”
says the vulture industry (while quietly guarding
their own patents and trademarks). What they aim
to control is the metadata.
It’s a new kind of exploitation, one based on an
unequal exchange of information. You can have the
little scraps of détournement that you desire, in exchange for performing a whole lot of free labor—and
giving up all of the metadata. So you get your little
bit of data; they get all of it, and more importantly,
any information about that information, such as
the where and when and what of it.
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It is an interesting feature of this mode of exploitation that you might not even be getting paid for your
labor in making this information—as Trebor Scholz
as pointed out. You are working for information
only. Hence exploitation can be extended far beyond
the workplace and into everyday life. Only it is not
so much a social factory, as the autonomists call it.
This is more like a social boudoir. The whole of social
space is in some indeterminate state between public
and private. Some of your information is private to
other people. But pretty much all of it is owned by
the vulture industry — and via them ends up in the
hands of the surveillance state.
So this is how we lost the war. Making information free seemed like a good idea at the time. Indeed, one way of seeing what transpired is that we
forced the ruling class to come up with these new
strategies in response to our own self-organizing
activities. Their actions are reactions to our initiatives. In this sense the autonomists are right, only
it was not so much the actions of the working class
to which the ruling class had to respond in this case,
as what I call the hacker class. They had to recuperate a whole social movement, and they did. So our
tactics have to change.
In the past we were acting like data-punks. Not
so much “here’s three chords, now form your band.”
More like: “Here’s three gigs, now go form your autonomous art collective.” The new tactic might be
more question of being metadata-punks. On the one
hand, it is about freeing information about information rather than the information itself. We need
to move up the order of informational density and
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control. On the other hand, it might be an idea to
be a bit discreet about it. Maybe not everyone needs
to know about it. Perhaps it is time to practice what
Zach Blas calls infomatic opacity.
Three projects seem to embody much of this
spirit to me. One I am not even going to name or
discuss, as discretion seems advisable in that case.
It takes matters off the internet and out of circulation among strangers. Ask me about it in person if
we meet in person.
The other two are Monoskop Log and UbuWeb.
It is hard to know what to call them. They are websites, archives, databases, collections, repositories,
but they are also a bit more than that. They could be
thought of also as the work of artists or of curators;
of publishers or of writers; of archivists or researchers. They contain lots of files. Monoskop is mostly
books and journals; UbuWeb is mostly video and
audio. The work they contain is mostly by or about
the historic avant-gardes.
Monoskop Log bills itself as “an educational
open access online resource.” It is a component part
of Monoskop, “a wiki for collaborative studies of
art, media and the humanities.” One commenter
thinks they see the “fingerprint of the curator” but
nobody is named as its author, so let’s keep it that
way. It is particularly strong on Eastern European
avant-garde material. UbuWeb is the work of Kenneth Goldsmith, and is “a completely independent
resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde,
ethnopoetics, and outsider arts.”
There’s two aspects to consider here. One is the
wealth of free material both sites collect. For any-
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body trying to teach, study or make work in the
avant-garde tradition these are very useful resources.
The other is the ongoing selection, presentation and
explanation of the material going on at these sites
themselves. Both of them model kinds of ‘curatorial’
or ‘publishing’ behavior.
For instance, Monoskop has wiki pages, some
better than Wikipedia, which contextualize the work
of a given artist or movement. UbuWeb offers “top
ten” lists by artists or scholars which give insight
not only into the collection but into the work of the
person making the selection.
Monoskop and UbuWeb are tactics for intervening in three kinds of practices, those of the artworld, of publishing and of scholarship. They respond to the current institutional, technical and
political-economic constraints of all three. As it
says in the Communist Manifesto, the forces for social change are those that ask the property question.
While détournement was a sufficient answer to that
question in the era of the culture industries, they try
to formulate, in their modest way, a suitable tactic
for answering the property question in the era of
the vulture industries.
This takes the form of moving from data to metadata, expressed in the form of the move from writing
to publishing, from art-making to curating, from
research to archiving. Another way of thinking this,
suggested by Hiroki Azuma would be the move from
narrative to database. The object of critical attention
acquires a third dimension, a kind of informational
depth. The objects before us are not just a text or an
image but databases of potential texts and images,
with metadata attached.
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The object of any avant-garde is always to practice the relation between aesthetics and everyday
life with a new kind of intensity. UbuWeb and
Monoskop seem to me to be intimations of just
such an avant-garde movement. One that does not
offer a practice but a kind of meta-practice for the
making of the aesthetic within the everyday.
Crucial to this project is the shifting of aesthetic
intention from the level of the individual work to the
database of works. They contain a lot of material, but
not just any old thing. Some of the works available
here are very rare, but not all of them are. It is not
just rarity, or that the works are available for free.
It is more that these are careful, artful, thoughtful
collections of material. There are the raw materials here with which to construct a new civilization.
So we lost the battle, but the war goes on. This
civilization is over, and even its defenders know it.
We live in among ruins that accrete in slow motion.
It is not so much a civil war as an incivil war, waged
against the very conditions of existence of life itself.
So even if we have no choice but to use its technologies and cultures, the task is to build another way
of life among the ruins. Here are some useful practices, in and on and of the ruins. ❧
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http://midnightnotes.memoryoftheworld.org/
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The Future After the Library
UbuWeb and Monoskop’s
Radical Gestures
The institution of the public library has crystallized,
developed and advanced around historical junctures
unleashed by epochal economic, technological and
political changes. A series of crises since the advent
of print have contributed to the configuration of the
institutional entanglement of the public library as
we know it today:01 defined by a publicly available
collection, housed in a public building, indexed and
made accessible with a help of a public catalog, serviced by trained librarians and supported through
public financing. Libraries today embody the idea
of universal access to all knowledge, acting as custodians of a culture of reading, archivists of material
and ephemeral cultural production, go-betweens
of information and knowledge. However, libraries have also embraced a broader spirit of public
service and infrastructure: providing information,
01 For the concept and the full scope of the contemporary library
as institutional entanglement see Shannon Mattern, “Library
as Infrastructure”, Places Journal, accessed April 9, 2015,
https://placesjournal.org/article/library-as-infrastructure/.
The Future After the Library
121
education, skills, assistance and, ultimately, shelter
to their communities — particularly their most vulnerable members.
This institutional entanglement, consisting in
a comprehensive organization of knowledge, universally accessible cultural goods and social infrastructure, historically emerged with the rise of (information) science, social regulation characteristic
of modernity and cultural industries. Established
in its social aspect as the institutional exemption
from the growing commodification and economic
barriers in the social spheres of culture, education
and knowledge, it is a result of struggles for institutionalized forms of equality that still reflect the
best in solidarity and universality that modernity
had to offer. Yet, this achievement is marked by
contradictions that beset modernity at its core. Libraries and archives can be viewed as an organon
through which modernity has reacted to the crises
unleashed by the growing production and fixation
of text, knowledge and information through a history of transformations that we will discuss below.
They have been an epistemic crucible for the totalizing formalizations that have propelled both the
advances and pathologies of modernity.
Positioned at a slight monastic distance and indolence toward the forms of pastoral, sovereign or
economic domination that defined the surrounding world that sustained them, libraries could never
close the rift or between the universalist aspirations
of knowledge and their institutional compromise.
Hence, they could never avoid being the battlefield
where their own, and modernity’s, ambivalent epis-
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temic and social character was constantly re-examined and ripped asunder. It is this ambivalent
character that has been a potent motor for critical theory, artistic and political subversion — from
Marx’s critique of political economy, psychoanalysis
and historic avant-gardes, to revolutionary politics.
Here we will examine the formation of the library
as an epistemic and social institution of modernity
and the forms of critical engagement that continue
to challenge the totalizing order of knowledge and
appropriation of culture in the present.
Here Comes the Flood02
Prior to the advent of print, the collections held in
monastic scriptoria, royal courts and private libraries
typically contained a limited number of canonical
manuscripts, scrolls and incunabula. In Medieval
and early Renaissance Europe the canonized knowledge considered necessary for the administration of
heavenly and worldly affairs was premised on reading and exegesis of biblical and classical texts. It is
02 The metaphor of the information flood, here incanted in the
words of Peter Gabriel’s song with apocalyptic overtones, as
well as a good part of the historic background of the development of index card catalog in the following paragraphs
are based on Markus Krajewski, Paper Machines: About
Cards & Catalogs, 1548–1929 (MIT Press, 2011). The organizing idea of Krajewski’s historical account, that the index
card catalog can be understood as a Turing machine avant
la lettre, served as a starting point for the understanding
of the library as an epistemic institution developed here.
The Future After the Library
123
estimated that by the 15th century in Western Europe
there were no more than 5 million manuscripts held
mainly in the scriptoria of some 21,000 monasteries and a small number of universities. While the
number of volumes had grown sharply from less
than 0.8 million in the 12th century, the number of
monasteries had remained constant throughout that
period. The number of manuscripts read averaged
around 1,000 per million inhabitants, with the total
population of Europe peaking around 60 million.03
All in all, the book collections were small, access was
limited and reading culture played a marginal role.
The proliferation of written matter after the invention of mechanical movable type printing would
greatly increase the number of books, but also the
patterns of literacy and knowledge production. Already in the first fifty years after Gutenberg’s invention, 12 million volumes were printed, and from
this point onwards the output of printing presses
grew exponentially to 700 million volumes in the
18th century. In the aftermath of the explosion in
book production the cost of producing and buying
books fell drastically, reducing the economic barriers to literacy, but also creating a material vector
for a veritable shift of the epistemic paradigm. The
03 For an economic history of the book in the Western Europe
see Eltjo Buringh and Jan Luiten Van Zanden, “Charting
the ‘Rise of the West’: Manuscripts and Printed Books in
Europe, A Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through
Eighteenth Centuries”, The Journal of Economic History 69,
No. 02 (June 2009): 409–45, doi:10.1017/S0022050709000837,
particularly Tables 1-5.
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Tomislav Medak
emerging reading public was gaining access to the
new works of a nascent Enlightenment movement,
ushering in the modern age of science. In parallel
with those larger epochal transformations, the explosion of print also created a rising tide of new books
that suddenly inundated the libraries. The libraries
now had to contend both with the orders-of-magnitude greater volume of printed matter and the
growing complexity of systematically storing, ordering, classifying and tracking all of the volumes
in their collection. An once almost static collection
of canonical knowledge became an ever expanding
dynamic flux. This flood of new books, the first of
three to follow, presented principled, infrastructural and organizational challenges to the library that
radically transformed and coalesced its functions.
The epistemic shift created by this explosion of
library holdings led to a revision of the assumption
that the library is organized around a single holy
scripture and a small number of classical sources.
Coextensive with the emergence and multiplication of new sciences, the books that were entering
the library now covered an ever diversified scope
of topics and disciplines. And the sheer number of
new acquisitions demanded the physical expansion of libraries, which in turn required a radical
rethinking of the way the books were stored, displayed and indexed. In fact, the flood caused by the
printing press was nothing short of a revolution in
the organization, formalization and processing of
information and knowledge. This becomes evident
in the changes that unfolded between the 16th and
the early 20th in the cataloging of library collections.
The Future After the Library
125
The initial listings of books were kept in bound
volumes, books in their own right. But as the number of items arriving into the library grew, the constant need to insert new entries made the bound
book format increasingly impractical for library
catalogs. To make things more complicated still,
the diversification of the printed matter demanded
a richer bibliographic description that would allow
better comprehension of what was contained in the
volumes. Alongside the name of the author and the
book’s title, the description now needed to include
the format of the volume, the classification of the
subject matter and the book’s location in the library.
As the pace of new arrivals accelerated, the effort to
create a library catalog became unending, causing a
true crisis in the emerging librarian profession. This
would result in a number of physical and epistemic
innovations in the organization and formalization
of information and knowledge. The requirement
to constantly rearrange the order of entries in the
listing lead to the eventual unbinding of the bound
catalog into separate slips of paper and finally to the
development of the index card catalog. The unbound
index cards and their floating rearrangement, not
unlike that of the movable type, would in turn result in the design of filing cabinets. From Conrad
Gessner’s Bibliotheca Universalis, a three-volume
book-format catalog of around 3,000 authors and
10,000 texts, arranged alphabetically and topically,
published in the period 1545–1548; Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s proposals for a universal library
during his tenure at the Wolfenbüttel library in the
late 17th century; to Gottfried van Swieten’s catalog
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Tomislav Medak
of the Viennese court library, the index card catalog and the filing cabinets would develop almost to
their present form.04
The unceasing inflow of new books into the library
prompted the need to spatially organize and classify
the arrangement of the collection. The simple addition of new books to the shelves by size; canonical
relevance or alphabetical order, made little sense
in a situation where the corpus of printed matter
was quickly expanding and no individual librarian
could retain an intimate overview of the library’s
entire collection. The inflow of books required that
the brimming shelf-space be planned ahead, while
the increasing number of expanding disciplines required that the collection be subdivided into distinct
sections by fields. First the shelves became classified
and then the books individually received a unique
identifier. With the completion of the Josephinian
catalog in the Viennese court library, every book became compartmentalized according to a systematic
plan of sciences and assigned a unique sequence of
a Roman numeral, a Roman letter and an Arabic
numeral by which it could be tracked down regardless of its physical location.05 The physical location
of the shelves in the library no longer needed to be
reflected in the ordering of the catalog, and the catalog became a symbolic representation of the freely
re-arrangeable library. In the technological lingo of
today, the library required storage, index, search
and address in order to remain navigable. It is this
04 Krajewski, Paper Machines, op. cit., chapter 2.
05 Ibid., 30.
The Future After the Library
127
formalization of a universal system of classification
of objects in the library with the relative location of
objects and re-arrangeable index that would then in
1876 receive its present standardized form in Melvil
Dewey’s Decimal System.
The development of the library as an institution of
public access and popular literacy did not proceed
apace with the development of its epistemic aspects.
It was only a series of social upheavals and transformations in the course of the 18th and 19th century
that would bring about another flood of books and
political demands, pushing the library to become
embedded in an egalitarian and democratic political culture. The first big step in that direction came
with the decision of the French revolutionary National Assembly from 2 November 1789 to seize all
book collections from the Church and aristocracy.
Million of volumes were transferred to the Bibliothèque Nationale and local libraries across France.
In parallel, particularly in England, capitalism was
on the rise. It massively displaced the impoverished rural population into growing urban centers,
propelled the development of industrial production and, by the mid-19th century, introduced the
steam-powered rotary press into the book business.
As books became more easily, and mass produced,
the commercial subscription libraries catering to the
better-off parts of society blossomed. This brought
the class aspect of the nascent demand for public
access to books to the fore. After the failed attempts
to introduce universal suffrage and end the system
of political representation based on property entitlements in 1830s and 1840s, the English Chartist
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Tomislav Medak
movement started to open reading rooms and cooperative lending libraries that would quickly become
a popular hotbed of social exchanges between the
lower classes. In the aftermath of the revolutionary
upheavals of 1848, the fearful ruling classes heeded
the demand for tax-financed public libraries, hoping
that the access to literature and edification would
ultimately hegemonize the working class for the
benefits of capitalism’s culture of self-interest and
competition.06
The Avant-gardes in the Library
As we have just demonstrated, the public library
in its epistemic and social aspects coalesced in the
context of the broader social transformations of
modernity: early capitalism and processes of nation-building in Europe and the USA. These transformations were propelled by the advancement of
political and economic rationalization, public and
business administration, statistical and archival
procedures. Archives underwent a corresponding and largely concomitant development with the
libraries, responding with a similar apparatus of
classification and ordering to the exponential expansion of administrative records documenting the
social world and to the historicist impulse to capture the material traces of past events. Overlaying
the spatial organization of documentation; rules
06 For the social history of public library see Matthew Battles,
Library: An Unquiet History (Random House, 2014) chapter
5: “Books for all”.
The Future After the Library
129
of its classification and symbolic representation of
the archive in reference tools, they tried to provide
a formalization adequate to the passion for capturing historical or present events. Characteristic
of the ascendant positivism of the 19th century, the
archivists’ and librarians’ epistemologies harbored
a totalizing tendency that would become subject to
subversion and displacement in the first decades of
the 20th century.
The assumption that the classificatory form can
fully capture the archival content would become
destabilized over and over by the early avant-gardist
permutations of formal languages of classification:
dadaist montage of the contingent compositional
elements, surrealist insistence on the unconscious
surpluses produced by automatized formalized language, constructivist foregrounding of dynamic and
spatialized elements in the acts of perception and
cognition of an artwork.07 The material composition
of the classified and ordered objects already contained formalizations deposited into those objects
by the social context of their provenance or projected onto them by the social situation of encounter
with them. Form could become content and content
could become form. The appropriations, remediations and displacements exacted by the neo-avantgardes in the second half of the 20th century pro07 Sven Spieker, The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (MIT
Press, 2008) provides a detailed account of strategies that
the historic avant-gardes and the post-war art have developed toward the classificatory and ordering regime of the
archive.
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Tomislav Medak
duced subversions, resignifications and simulacra
that only further blurred the lines between histories
and their construction, dominant classifications and
their immanent instabilities.
Where does the library fit into this trajectory? Operating around an uncertain and politically embattled universal principle of public access to knowledge
and organization of information, libraries continued being sites of epistemic and social antagonisms,
adaptations and resilience in response to the challenges created by the waves of radical expansion of
textuality and conflicting social interests between
the popular reading culture and the commodification of cultural consumption. This precarious position is presently being made evident by the third
big flood — after those unleashed by movable type
printing and the social context of industrial book
production — that is unfolding with the transition
of the book into the digital realm. Both the historic
mode of the institutional regulation of access and
the historic form of epistemic classification are
swept up in this transformation. While the internet
has made possible a radically expanded access to
digitized culture and knowledge, the vested interests of cultural industries reliant on copyright for
their control over cultural production have deepened the separation between cultural producers and
their readers, listeners and viewers. While the hypertextual capacity for cross-reference has blurred
the boundaries of the book, digital rights management technologies have transformed e-books into
closed silos. Both the decommodification of access
and the overcoming of the reified construct of the
The Future After the Library
131
self-enclosed work in the form of a book come at
the cost of illegality.
Even the avant-gardes in all their inappropriable
and idiosyncratic recalcitrance fall no less under
the legally delimited space of copyrightable works.
As they shift format, new claims of ownership and
appropriation are built. Copyright is a normative
classification that is totalizing, regardless of the
effects of leaky networks speaking to the contrary.
Few efforts have insisted on the subverting of juridical classification by copyright more lastingly than
the UbuWeb archive. Espousing the avant-gardes’
ethos of appropriation, for almost 20 years it has
collected and made accessible the archives of the
unknown; outsider, rare and canonized avant-gardes and contemporary art that would otherwise remained reserved for the vaults and restricted access
channels of esoteric markets, selective museological
presentations and institutional archives. Knowing
that asking to publish would amount to aligning itself with the totalizing logic of copyright, UbuWeb
has shunned the permission culture. At the level of
poetical operation, as a gesture of displacing the cultural archive from a regime of limited, into a regime
of unlimited access, it has created provocations and
challenges directed at the classifying and ordering
arrangements of property over cultural production.
One can only assume that as such it has become a
mechanism for small acts of treason for the artists,
who, short of turning their back fully on the institutional arrangements of the art world they inhabit,
use UbuWeb to release their own works into unlimited circulation on the net. Sometimes there might
132
Tomislav Medak
be no way or need to produce a work outside the
restrictions imposed by those institutions, just as
sometimes it is for academics impossible to avoid
the contradictory world of academic publishing,
yet that is still no reason to keep one’s allegiance to
their arrangements.
At the same time UbuWeb has played the game
of avant-gardist subversion: “If it doesn’t exist on
the internet, it doesn’t exist”. Provocation is most
effective when it is ignorant of the complexities of
the contexts that it is directed at. Its effect starts
where fissures in the defense of the opposition start
to show. By treating UbuWeb as massive evidence
for the internet as a process of reappropriation, a
process of “giving to all”, its volunteering spiritus
movens, Kenneth Goldsmith, has been constantly rubbing copyright apologists up the wrong way.
Rather than producing qualifications, evasions and
ambivalences, straightforward affirmation of copy
ing, plagiarism and reproduction as a dominant
yet suppressed mode of operation of digital culture re-enacts the avant-gardes’ gesture of taking
no hostages from the officially sanctioned systems
of classification. By letting the incumbents of control over cultural production react to the norm of
copying, you let them struggle to dispute the norm
rather than you having to try to defend the norm.
UbuWeb was an early-comer, starting in 1996
and still functioning today on seemingly similar
technology, it’s a child of the early days of World
Wide Web and the promissory period of the experimental internet. It’s resolutely Web 1.0, with
a single maintainer, idiosyncratically simple in its
The Future After the Library
133
layout and programmatically committed to the
eventual obsolescence and sudden abandonment.
No platform, no generic design, no widgets, no
kludges and no community features. Only Beckett
avec links. Endgame.
A Book is an Index is an Index is an Index...
Since the first book flood, the librarian dream of
epistemological formalization has revolved around
the aspiration to cross-reference all the objects in
the collection. Within the physical library the topical designation has been relegated to the confines of
index card catalog that remained isolated from the
structure of citations and indexes in the books themselves. With the digital transition of the book, the
time-shifted hypertextuality of citations and indexes
became realizable as the immediate cross-referentiality of the segments of individual text to segments
of other texts and other digital artifacts across now
permeable boundaries of the book.
Developed as a wiki for collaborative studies of
art, media and the humanities, Monoskop.org took
up the task of mapping and describing avant-gardes and media art in Europe. In its approach both
indexical and encyclopedic, it is an extension of
the collaborative editing made possible by wiki
technology. Wikis rose to prominence in the early
2000s allowing everyone to edit and extend websites running on that technology by mastering a
very simple markup language. Wikis have been the
harbinger of a democratization of web publishing
that would eventually produce the largest collabo-
134
Tomislav Medak
rative website on the internet — the Wikipedia, as
well as a number of other collaborative platforms.
Monoskop.org embraces the encyclopedic spirit of
Wikipedia, focusing on its own specific topical and
topological interests. However, from its earliest days
Monoskop.org has also developed as a form of index
that maps out places, people, artworks, movements,
events and venues that compose the dense network
of European avant-gardes and media art.
If we take the index as a formalization of cross-referential relations between names of people, titles
of works and concepts that exist in the books and
across the books, what emerges is a model of a relational database reflecting the rich mesh of cultural
networks. Each book can serve as an index linking
its text to people, other books, segments in them.
To provide a paradigmatic demonstration of that
idea, Monoskop.org has assembled an index of all
persons in Friedrich Kittler’s Discourse Networks,
with each index entry linking both to its location
in the digital version of the book displayed on the
aaaaarg.org archive and to relevant resources for
those persons on the Monoskop.org and the internet. Hence, each object in the library, an index
in its own right, potentially allows one to initiate
the relational re-classification and re-organization
of all other works in the library through linkable
information.
Fundamental to the works of the post-socialist
retro-avant-gardes of the last couple of decades has
been the re-writing of a history of art in reverse.
In the works of IRWIN, Laibach or Mladen Stilinović, or comparable work of Komar & Melamid,
The Future After the Library
135
totalizing modernity is detourned by re-appropriating the forms of visual representation and classification that the institutions of modernity used to
construct a linear historical narrative of evolutions
and breaks in the 19th and 20th century. Genealogical
tables, events, artifacts and discourses of the past
were re-enacted, over-affirmed and displaced to
open up the historic past relegated to the archives
to an understanding that transformed the present
into something radically uncertain. The efforts of
Monoskop.org in digitizing of the artifacts of the
20th century avant-gardes and playing with the
epistemic tools of early book culture is a parallel
gesture, with a technological twist. If big data and
the control over information flows of today increasingly naturalizes and re-affirms the 19th century
positivist assumptions of the steerablity of society,
then the endlessly recombinant relations and affiliations between cultural objects threaten to overflow
that recurrent epistemic framework of modernity’s
barbarism in its cybernetic form.
The institution of the public library finds itself
today under a double attack. One unleashed by
the dismantling of the institutionalized forms of
social redistribution and solidarity. The other by
the commodifying forces of expanding copyright
protections and digital rights management, control
over the data flows and command over the classification and order of information. In a world of
collapsing planetary boundaries and unequal development, those who control the epistemic order
136
Tomislav Medak
control the future.08 The Googles and the NSAs run
on capturing totality — the world’s knowledge and
communication made decipherable, organizable and
controllable. The instabilities of the epistemic order
that the library continues to instigate at its margins
contributes to keeping the future open beyond the
script of ‘commodify and control’. In their acts of
re-appropriation UbuWeb and Monoskop.org are
but a reminder of the resilience of libraries’ instability that signals toward a future that can be made
radically open. ❧
08 In his article “Controlling the Future—Edward Snowden and
the New Era on Earth”, (accessed April 13, 2015, http://www.
eurozine.com/articles/2014-12-19-altvater-en.html), Elmar
Altvater makes a comparable argument that the efforts of
the “Five Eyes” to monitor the global communication flows,
revealed by Edward Snowden, and the control of the future
social development defined by the urgency of mitigating the
effects of the planetary ecological crisis cannot be thought
apart.
The Future After the Library
137
138
public library
http://kok.memoryoftheworld.org
139
Public Library
www.memoryoftheworld.org
Publishers
What, How & for Whom / WHW
Slovenska 5/1 • HR-10000 Zagreb
+385 (0) 1 3907261
whw@whw.hr • www.whw.hr
ISBN 978-953-55951-3-7 [Što, kako i za koga/WHW]
Multimedia Institute
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+385 (0)1 4856400
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Editors
Tomislav Medak • Marcell Mars • What, How & for Whom / WHW
Copy Editor
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Anthony Iles [English]
Translations
Una Bauer
Tomislav Medak
Dušanka Profeta
W. Boyd Rayward
Design & layout
Dejan Kršić @ WHW
Typography
MinionPro [robert slimbach • adobe]
English translation of the Paul
Otlet’s text published with the permission of W. Boyd
Rayward. The translation was originally published as
Paul Otlet, “Transformations in the Bibliographical
Apparatus of the Sciences: Repertory–Classification–Office
of Documentation”, in International Organisation and
Dissemination of Knowledge; Selected Essays of Paul Otlet,
translated and edited by W. Boyd Rayward, Amsterdam:
Elsevier, 1990: 148–156. ❧
format / size
120 × 200 mm
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Paper
Agrippina 120 g • Rives Laid 300 g
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Print Run
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This publication, realized along with the exhibition
Public Library in Gallery Nova, Zagreb 2015, is a part of
the collaborative project This Is Tomorrow. Back to Basics:
Forms and Actions in the Future organized by What, How
& for Whom / WHW, Zagreb, Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm
and Latvian Center for Contemporary Art / LCCA, Riga, as a
part of the book edition Art As Life As Work As Art. ❧
Supported by
Office of Culture, Education and Sport of the City of Zagreb
Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia
Croatian Government Office for Cooperation with NGOs
Creative Europe Programme of the European Commission.
National Foundation for Civil Society Development
Kultura Nova Foundation
This project has been funded with support
from European Commision. This publication reflects
the views only of the authors, and the Commission
cannot be held responsible for any use which may be
made of the information contained therein. ❧
Publishing of this book is enabled by financial support of
the National Foundation for Civil Society Development.
The content of the publication is responsibility of
its authors and as such does not necessarily reflect
the views of the National Foundation. ❧
This project is financed
by the Croatian Government Office for Cooperation
with NGOs. The views expressed in this publication
are the sole responsibility of the publishers. ❧
This book is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution–ShareAlike 4.0
International License. ❧
I first spoke to the patient in the last week of that August. That evening the
sun was tender in drawing its shadows across the lines of his face. The eyes
gazed softly into a close middle distance, as if composing a line upon a
translucent page hung in the middle of the air, the hands tapping out a stanza
or two of music on legs covered by the brown folds of a towelling dressing
gown. He had the air of someone who had seen something of great amazement but
yet lacked the means to put it into language. As I got to know the patient
over the next few weeks I learned that this was not for the want of effort.
In his youth he had dabbled with the world-speak language Volapük, one
designed to do away with the incompatibility of tongues, to establish a
standard in which scientific intercourse might be conducted with maximum
efficiency and with minimal friction in movement between minds, laboratories
and publications. Latin biological names, the magnificent table of elements,
metric units of measurement, the nomenclature of celestial objects from clouds
to planets, anatomical parts and medical conditions all had their own systems
of naming beyond any specific tongue. This was an attempt to bring reason into
speech and record, but there were other means to do so when reality resisted
these early measures.
The dabbling, he reflected, had become a little more than that. He had
subscribed to journals in the language, he wrote letters to colleagues and
received them in return. A few words of world-speak remained readily on his
tongue, words that he spat out regularly into the yellow-wallpapered lounge of
the sanatorium with a disgust that was lugubriously palpable.
According to my records, and in piecing together the notes of previous
doctors, there was something else however, something more profound that the
language only hinted at. Just as the postal system did not require the
adoption of any language in particular but had its formats that integrated
them into addressee, address line, postal town and country, something that
organised the span of the earth, so there was a sense of the patient as having
sustained an encounter with a fundamental form of organisation that mapped out
his soul. More thrilling than the question of language indeed was that of the
system of organisation upon which linguistic symbols are inscribed. I present
for the reader’s contemplation some statements typical of those he seemed to
mull over.
“The index card system spoke to my soul. Suffice it to say that in its use I
enjoyed the highest form of spiritual pleasure, and organisational efficiency,
a profound flowering of intellect in which every thought moved between its
enunciation, evidence, reference and articulation in a mellifluous flow of
ideation and the gratification of curiosity.” This sense of the soul as a
roving enquiry moving across eras, across forms of knowledge and through the
serried landscapes of the vast planet and cosmos was returned to over and
over, a sense that an inexplicable force was within him yet always escaping
his touch.
“At every reference stood another reference, each more interesting than the
last. Each the apex of a pyramid of further reading, pregnant with the threat
of digression, each a thin high wire which, if not observed might lead the
author into the fall of error, a finding already found against and written
up.” He mentions too, a number of times, the way the furniture seemed to
assist his thoughts - the ease of reference implied by the way in which the
desk aligned with the text resting upon the pages of the off-print, journal,
newspaper, blueprint or book above which further drawers of cards stood ready
in their cabinet. All were integrated into the system. And yet, amidst these
frenetic recollections there was a note of mourning in his contemplative
moods, “The superposition of all planes of enquiry and of thought in one
system repels those for whom such harmonious speed is suspicious.” This
thought was delivered with a stare that was not exactly one of accusation, but
that lingered with the impression that there was a further statement to follow
it, and another, queued up ready to follow.
As I gained the trust of the patient, there was a sense in which he estimated
me as something of a junior collaborator, a clerk to his natural role as
manager. A lucky, if slightly doubtful, young man whom he might mentor into
efficiency and a state of full access to information. For his world, there was
not the corruption and tiredness of the old methods. Ideas moved faster in his
mind than they might now across the world. To possess a register of thoughts
covering a period of some years is to have an asset, the value of which is
almost incalculable. That it can answer any question respecting any thought
about which one has had an enquiry is but the smallest of its merits. More
important is the fact that it continually calls attention to matters requiring
such attention.
Much of his discourse was about the optimum means of arrangement of the
system, there was an art to laying out the cards. As the patient further
explained, to meet the objection that loose cards may easily be mislaid, cards
may be tabbed with numbers from one to ten. When arranged in the drawer, these
tabs proceed from left to right across the drawer and the absence of a single
card can thus easily be detected. The cards are further arranged between
coloured guide cards. As an alternative to tabbed cards, signal flags may be
used. Here, metal clips may be attached to the top end of the card and that
stand out like guides. For use of the system in relation to dates of the
month, the card is printed with the numbers 1 to 31 at the top. The metal clip
is placed as a signal to indicate the card is to receive attention on the
specified day. Within a large organisation a further card can be drawn up to
assign responsibility for processing that date’s cards. There were numerous
means of working the cards, special techniques for integrating them into any
type of research or organisation, means by which indexes operating on indexes
could open mines of information and expand the knowledge and capabilities of
mankind.
As he pressed me further, I began to experiment with such methods myself by
withdrawing data from the sanatorium’s records and transferring it to cards in
the night. The advantages of the system are overwhelming. Cards, cut to the
right mathematical degree of accuracy, arrayed readily in drawers, set in
cabinets of standard sizes that may be added to at ease, may be apportioned
out amongst any number of enquirers, all of whom may work on them
independently and simultaneously. The bound book, by contrast, may only be
used by one person at a time and that must stay upon a shelf itself referred
to by an index card system. I began to set up a structure of rows of mirrors
on chains and pulleys and a set of levered and hinged mechanical arms to allow
me to open the drawers and to privately consult my files from any location
within the sanatorium. The clarity of the image is however so far too much
effaced by the diffusion of light across the system.
It must further be borne in mind that a system thus capable of indefinite
expansion obviates the necessity for hampering a researcher with furniture or
appliances of a larger size than are immediately required. The continuous and
orderly sequence of the cards may be extended further into the domain of
furniture and to the conduct of business and daily life. Reasoning, reference
and the order of ideas emerging as they embrace and articulate a chaotic world
and then communicate amongst themselves turning the world in turn into
something resembling the process of thought in an endless process of
consulting, rephrasing, adding and sorting.
For the patient, ideas flowed like a force of life, oblivious to any unnatural
limitation. Thought became, with the proper use of the system, part of the
stream of life itself. Thought moved through the cards not simply at the
superficial level of the movement of fingers and the mechanical sliding and
bunching of cards, but at the most profound depths of the movement between
reality and our ideas of it. The organisational grace to be found in
arrangement, classification and indexing still stirred the remnants of his
nervous system until the last day.
Abstract
In the digital era where, thanks to the ubiquity of electronic copies, the book is no longer a scarce
resource, libraries find themselves in an extremely competitive environment. Several different actors are
now in a position to provide low cost access to knowledge. One of these competitors are shadow libraries
- piratical text collections which have now amassed electronic copies of millions of copyrighted works
and provide access to them usually free of charge to anyone around the globe. While such shadow
libraries are far from being universal, they are able to offer certain services better, to more people and
under more favorable terms than most public or research libraries. This contribution offers insights into
the development and the inner workings of one of the biggest scientific shadow libraries on the internet in
order to understand what kind of library people create for themselves if they have the means and if they
don’t have to abide by the legal, bureaucratic and economic constraints that libraries usually face. I argue
that one of the many possible futures of the library is hidden in the shadows, and those who think of the
future of libraries can learn a lot from book pirates of the 21 st century about how users and readers expect
texts in electronic form to be stored, organized and circulated.
“The library is society’s last non-commercial meeting place which the majority of the population uses.”
(Committee on the Public Libraries in the Knowledge Society, 2010)
“With books ready to be shared, meticulously cataloged, everyone is a librarian. When everyone is
librarian, library is everywhere.” – Marcell Mars, www.memoryoftheworld.org
I have spent the last few months in various libraries visiting - a library. I spent countless hours in the
modest or grandiose buildings of the Harvard Libraries, the Boston and Cambridge Public Library
systems, various branches of the Openbare Bibliotheek in Amsterdam, the libraries of the University of
Amsterdam, with a computer in front of me, on which another library was running, a library which is
perfectly virtual, which has no monumental buildings, no multi-million euro budget, no miles of stacks,
no hundreds of staff, but which has, despite lacking all what apparently makes a library, millions of
literary works and millions of scientific books, all digitized, all available at the click of the mouse for
everyone on the earth without any charge, library or university membership. As I was sitting in these
1
Bodó B. (2015): Libraries in the post-scarcity era.
in: Porsdam (ed): Copyrighting Creativity: Creative values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, Ashgate
physical spaces where the past seemed to define the present, I was wondering where I should look to find
the library of the future: down to my screen or up around me.
The library on my screen was Aleph, one of the biggest of the countless piratical text collections on the
internet. It has more than a million scientific works and another million literary works to offer, all free to
download, without any charge or fee, for anyone on the net. I’ve spent months among its virtual stacks,
combing through the catalogue, talking to the librarians who maintain the collection, and watching the
library patrons as they used the collection. I kept going back to Aleph both as a user and as a researcher.
As a user, Aleph offered me books that the local libraries around me didn’t, in formats that were more
convenient than print. As a researcher, I was interested in the origins of Aleph, its modus operandi, its
future, and I was curious where the journey to which it has taken the book-readers, authors, publishers
and libraries would end.
In this short essay I will introduce some of the findings of a two year research project conducted on
Aleph. In the project I looked at several things. I reconstructed the pirate library’s genesis in order to
understand the forces that called it to life and shaped its development. I looked at its catalogue to
understand what it has to offer and how that piratical supply of books is related to the legal supply of
books through libraries and online distributors. I also acquired data on its usage, so was able to
reconstruct some aspects of piratical demand. After a short introduction, in the first part of this essay I
will outline some of the main findings, and in the second part will situate the findings in the wider context
of the future of libraries.
Book pirates and shadow librarians
Book piracy has a fascinating history, tightly woven into the history of the printing press (Judge, 1934),
into the history of censorship (Wittmann, 2004), into the history of copyright (Bently, Davis, & Ginsburg,
2010; Bodó, 2011a) and into the history of European civilization (Johns, 2010). Book piracy, in the 21st or
in the mid-17th century is an activity that has deep cultural significance, because ultimately it is a story
about how knowledge is circulated beyond and often against the structures of political and economic
power (Bodó, 2011b), and thus it is a story about the changes this unofficial circulation of knowledge
brings.
There are many different types of book pirates. Some just aim for easy money, others pursue highly
ideological goals, but they are invariably powerful harbingers of change. The emergence of black markets
whether they be of culture, of drugs or of arms is always a symptom, a warning sign of a friction between
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Bodó B. (2015): Libraries in the post-scarcity era.
in: Porsdam (ed): Copyrighting Creativity: Creative values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, Ashgate
supply and demand. Increased activity in the grey and black zones of legality marks the emergence of a
demand which legal suppliers are unwilling or unable to serve (Bodó, 2011a). That friction, more often
than not, leads to change. Earlier waves of book piracy foretold fundamental economic, political, societal
or technological shifts (Bodó, 2011b): changes in how the book publishing trade was organized (Judge,
1934; Pollard, 1916, 1920); the emergence of the new, bourgeois reading class (Patterson, 1968; Solly,
1885); the decline of pre-publication censorship (Rose, 1993); the advent of the Reformation and of the
Enlightenment (Darnton, 1982, 2003), or the rapid modernization of more than one nation (Khan &
Sokoloff, 2001; Khan, 2004; Yu, 2000).
The latest wave of piracy has coincided with the digital revolution which, in itself, profoundly upset the
economics of cultural production and distribution (Landes & Posner, 2003). However technology is not
the primary cause of the emergence of cultural black markets like Aleph. The proliferation of computers
and the internet has just revealed a more fundamental issue which all has to do with the uneven
distribution of the access to knowledge around the globe.
Sometimes book pirates do more than just forecast and react to changes that are independent of them.
Under certain conditions, they themselves can be powerful agents of change (Bodó, 2011b). Their agency
rests on their ability to challenge the status quo and resist cooptation or subjugation. In that effect, digital
pirates seem to be quite resilient (Giblin, 2011; Patry, 2009). They have the technological upper hand and
so far they have been able to outsmart any copyright enforcement effort (Bodó, forthcoming). As long as
it is not completely possible to eradicate file sharing technologies, and as long as there is a substantial
difference between what is legally available and what is in demand, cultural black markets will be here to
compete with and outcompete the established and recognized cultural intermediaries. Under this constant
existential threat, business models and institutions are forced to adapt, evolve or die.
After the music and audiovisual industries, now the book industry has to address the issue of piracy.
Piratical book distribution services are now in direct competition with the bookstore on the corner, the
used book stall on the sidewalk, they compete with the Amazons of the world and, like it or not, they
compete with libraries. There is, however, a significant difference between the book and the music
industries. The reluctance of music rights holders to listen to the demands of their customers caused little
damage beyond the markets of recorded music. Music rights holders controlled their own fates and those
who wanted to experiment with alternative forms of distribution had the chance to do so. But while the
rapid proliferation of book black markets may signal that the book industry suffers from similar problems
as the music industry suffered a decade ago, the actions of book publishers, the policies they pursue have
impact beyond the market of books and directly affect the domain of libraries.
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Bodó B. (2015): Libraries in the post-scarcity era.
in: Porsdam (ed): Copyrighting Creativity: Creative values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, Ashgate
The fate of libraries is tied to the fate of book markets in more than one way. One connection is structural:
libraries emerged to remedy the scarcity in books. This is true both for the pre-print era as well as in the
Gutenberg galaxy. In the era of widespread literacy and highly developed book markets, libraries offer
access to books under terms publishers and booksellers cannot or would not. Libraries, to a large extent,
are defined to complement the structure of the book trade. The other connection is legal. The core
activities of the library (namely lending, copying) are governed by the same copyright laws that govern
authors and publishers. Libraries are one of the users in the copyright system, and their existence depends
on the limitations of and exceptions to the exclusive rights of the rights holders. The space that has been
carved out of copyright to enable the existence of libraries has been intensely contested in the era of
postmodern copyright (Samuelson, 2002) and digital technologies. This heavy legal and structural
interdependence with the market means that libraries have only a limited control over their own fate in the
digital domain.
Book pirates compete with some of the core services of libraries. And as is usually the case with
innovation that has no economic or legal constraints, pirate libraries offer, at least for the moment,
significantly better services than most of the libraries. Pirate libraries offer far more electronic books,
with much less restrictions and constraints, to far more people, far cheaper than anyone else in the library
domain. Libraries are thus directly affected by pirate libraries, and because of their structural
interdependence with book markets, they also have to adjust to how the commercial intermediaries react
to book piracy. Under such conditions libraries cannot simply count on their survival through their legacy.
Book piracy must be taken seriously, not just as a threat, but also as an opportunity to learn how shadow
libraries operate and interact with their users. Pirate libraries are the products of readers (and sometimes
authors), academics and laypeople, all sharing a deep passion for the book, operating in a zone where
there is little to no obstacle to the development of the “ideal” library. As such, pirate libraries can teach
important lessons on what is expected of a library, how book consumption habits evolve, and how
knowledge flows around the globe.
Pirate libraries in the digital age
The collection of texts in digital formats was one of the first activities that computers enabled: the text file
is the native medium of the computer, it is small, thus it is easy to store and copy. It is also very easy to
create, and as so many projects have since proved, there are more than enough volunteers who are willing
to type whole books into the machine. No wonder that electronic libraries and digital text repositories
were among the first “mainstream” application of computers. Combing through large stacks of matrix-
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in: Porsdam (ed): Copyrighting Creativity: Creative values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, Ashgate
printer printouts of sci-fi classics downloaded from gopher servers is a shared experience of anyone who
had access to computers and the internet before it was known as the World Wide Web.
Computers thus added fresh momentum to the efforts of realizing the age-old dream of the universal
library (Battles, 2004). Digital technologies offered a breakthrough in many of the issues that previously
posed serious obstacles to text collection: storage, search, preservation, access have all become cheaper
and easier than ever before. On the other hand, a number of key issues remained unresolved: digitization
was a slow and cumbersome process, while the screen proved to be too inconvenient, and the printer too
costly an interface between the text file and the reader. In any case, ultimately it wasn’t these issues that
put a break to the proliferation of digital libraries. Rather, it was the realization, that there are legal limits
to the digitization, storage, distribution of copyrighted works on the digital networks. That realization
soon rendered many text collections in the emerging digital library scene inaccessible.
Legal considerations did not destroy this chaotic, emergent digital librarianship and the collections the adhoc, accidental and professional librarians put together. The text collections were far too valuable to
simply delete them from the servers. Instead, what happened to most of these collections was that they
retreated from the public view, back into the access-controlled shadows of darknets. Yesterday’s gophers
and anonymous ftp servers turned into closed, membership only ftp servers, local shared libraries residing
on the intranets of various academic, business institutions and private archives stored on local hard drives.
The early digital libraries turned into book piracy sites and into the kernels of today’s shadow libraries.
Libraries and other major actors, who decided to start large scale digitization programs soon needed to
find out that if they wanted to avoid costly lawsuits, then they had to limit their activities to work in the
public domain. While the public domain is riddled with mind-bogglingly complex and unresolved legal
issues, but at least it is still significantly less complicated to deal with than copyrighted and orphan works.
Legally more innovative, (or as some would say, adventurous) companies, such as Google and Microsoft,
who thought they had sufficient resources to sort out the legal issues soon had to abandon their programs
or put them on hold until the legal issues were sorted out.
There were, however, a large group of disenfranchised readers, library patrons, authors and users who
decided to ignore the legal problems and set out to build the best library that could possibly be built using
the digital technologies. Despite the increased awareness of rights holders to the issue of digital book
piracy, more and more communities around text collections started defy the legal constraints and to
operate and use more or less public piratical shadow libraries.
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Bodó B. (2015): Libraries in the post-scarcity era.
in: Porsdam (ed): Copyrighting Creativity: Creative values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, Ashgate
Aleph1
Aleph2 is a meta-library, and currently one of the biggest online piratical text collections on the internet.
The project started on a Russian bulletin board devoted to piracy in around 2008 as an effort to integrate
various free-floating text collections that circulated online, on optical media, on various public and private
ftp servers and on hard-drives. Its aim was to consolidate these separate text collections, many of which
were created in various Russian academic institutions, into a single, unified catalog, standardize the
technical aspects, add and correct missing or incorrect metadata, and offer the resulting catalogue,
computer code and the collection of files as an open infrastructure.
From Russia with love
It is by no means a mistake that Aleph was born in Russia. In post-Soviet Russia the unique constellation
of several different factors created the necessary conditions for the digital librarianship movement that
ultimately led to the development of Aleph. A rich literary legacy, the Soviet heritage, the pace with
which various copying technologies penetrated the market, the shortcomings of the legal environment and
the informal norms that stood in for the non-existent digital copyrights all contributed to the emergence of
the biggest piratical library in the history of mankind.
Russia cherishes a rich literary tradition, which suffered and endured extreme economic hardships and
political censorship during the Soviet period (Ermolaev, 1997; Friedberg, Watanabe, & Nakamoto, 1984;
Stelmakh, 2001). The political transformation in the early 1990’s liberated authors, publishers, librarians
and readers from much of the political oppression, but it did not solve the economic issues that stood in
the way of a healthy literary market. Disposable income was low, state subsidies were limited, the dire
economic situation created uncertainty in the book market. The previous decades, however, have taught
authors and readers how to overcome political and economic obstacles to access to books. During the
Soviet times authors, editors and readers operated clandestine samizdat distribution networks, while
informal book black markets, operating in semi-private spheres, made uncensored but hard to come by
books accessible (Stelmakh, 2001). This survivalist attitude and the skills that came with it became handy
in the post-Soviet turmoil, and were directly transferable to the then emerging digital technologies.
1
I have conducted extensive research on the origins of Aleph, on its catalogue and its users. The detailed findings, at
the time of writing this contribution are being prepared for publication. The following section is brief summary of
those findings and is based upon two forthcoming book chapters on Aleph in a report, edited by Joe Karaganis, on
the role of shadow libraries in the higher education systems of multiple countries.
2
Aleph is a pseudonym chosen to protect the identity of the shadow library in question.
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Bodó B. (2015): Libraries in the post-scarcity era.
in: Porsdam (ed): Copyrighting Creativity: Creative values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, Ashgate
Russia is not the only country with a significant informal media economy of books, but in most other
places it was the photocopy machine that emerged to serve such book grey/black markets. In pre-1990
Russia and in other Eastern European countries the access to this technology was limited, and when
photocopiers finally became available, computers were close behind them in terms of accessibility. The
result of the parallel introduction of the photocopier and the computer was that the photocopy technology
did not have time to lock in the informal market of texts. In many countries where the photocopy machine
preceded the computer by decades, copy shops still capture the bulk of the informal production and
distribution of textbooks and other learning material. In the Soviet-bloc PCs instantly offered a less costly
and more adaptive technology to copy and distribute texts.
Russian academic and research institutions were the first to have access to computers. They also had to
somehow deal with the frustrating lack of access to up-to-date and affordable western works to be used in
education and research (Abramitzky & Sin, 2014). This may explain why the first batch of shadow
libraries started in a number of academic/research institutions such as the Department of Mechanics and
Mathematics (MexMat) at Moscow State University. The first digital librarians in Russia were
mathematicians, computer scientists and physicists, working in those institutions.
As PCs and internet access slowly penetrated Russian society, an extremely lively digital librarianship
movement emerged, mostly fuelled by enthusiastic readers, book fans and often authors, who spared no
effort to make their favorite books available on FIDOnet, a popular BBS system in Russia. One of the
central figures in these tumultuous years, when typed-in books appeared online by the thousands, was
Maxim Moshkov, a computer scientist, alumnus of the MexMat, and an avid collector of literary works.
His digital library, lib.ru was at first mostly a private collection of literary texts, but soon evolved into the
number one text repository which everyone used to depose the latest digital copy on a newly digitized
book (Мошков, 1999). Eventually the library grew so big that it had to be broken up. Today it only hosts
the Russian literary classics. User generated texts, fan fiction and amateur production was spin off into the
aptly named samizdat.lib.ru collection, low brow popular fiction, astrology and cheap romance found its
way into separate collections, and so did the collection of academic/scientific books, which started an
independent life under the name of Kolkhoz. Kolkhoz, which borrowed its name from the commons
based agricultural cooperative of the early Soviet era, was both a collection of scientific texts, and a
community of amateur librarians, who curated, managed and expanded the collection.
Moshkov and his library introduced several important norms into the bottom-up, decentralized, often
anarchic digital library movement that swept through the Russian internet in the late 1990’s, early 2000’s.
First, lib.ru provided the technological blueprint for any future digital library. But more importantly,
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in: Porsdam (ed): Copyrighting Creativity: Creative values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, Ashgate
Moshkov’s way of handling the texts, his way of responding to the claims, requests, questions, complaints
of authors and publishers paved the way to the development of copynorms (Schultz, 2007) that continue
to define the Russian digital library scene until today. Moshkov was instrumental in the creation of an
enabling environment for the digital librarianship while respecting the claims of authors, during times
when the formal copyright framework and the enforcement environment was both unable and unwilling to
protect works of authorship (Elst, 2005; Sezneva, 2012).
Guerilla Open Access
Around the time of the late 2000’s when Aleph started to merge the Kolkhoz collection with other, freefloating texts collections, two other notable events took place. It was in 2008 when Aaron Swartz penned
his Guerilla Open Access Manifesto (Swartz, 2008), in which he called for the liberation and sharing of
scientific knowledge. Swartz forcefully argued that scientific knowledge, the production of which is
mostly funded by the public and by the voluntary labor of academics, cannot be locked up behind
corporate paywalls set up by publishers. He framed the unauthorized copying and transfer of scientific
works from closed access text repositories to public archives as a moral act, and by doing so, he created
an ideological framework which was more radical and promised to be more effective than either the
creative commons (Lessig, 2004) or the open access (Suber, 2013) movements that tried to address the
access to knowledge issues in a more copyright friendly manner. During interviews, the administrators of
Aleph used the very same arguments to justify the raison d'être of their piratical library. While it seems
that Aleph is the practical realization of Swartz’s ideas, it is hard to tell which served as an inspiration for
the other.
It was also in around the same time when another piratical library, gigapedia/library.nu started its
operation, focusing mostly on making freely available English language scientific works (Liang, 2012).
Until its legal troubles and subsequent shutdown in 2012, gigapedia/library.nu was the biggest English
language piratical scientific library on the internet amassing several hundred thousand books, including
high-quality proofs ready to print and low resolution scans possibly prepared by a student or a lecturer.
During 2012 the mostly Russian-language and natural sciences focused Alephs absorbed the English
language, social sciences rich gigapedia/library.nu, and with the subsequent shutdown of
gigapedia/library.nu Aleph became the center of the scientific shadow library ecosystem and community.
Aleph by numbers
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Bodó B. (2015): Libraries in the post-scarcity era.
in: Porsdam (ed): Copyrighting Creativity: Creative values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, Ashgate
By adding pre-existing text collections to its catalogue Aleph was able to grow at an astonishing rate.
Aleph added, on average 17.500 books to its collection each month since 2009, and as a result, by April
2014 is has more than 1.15 million documents. Nearly two thirds of the collection is in English, one fifth
of the documents is in Russian, while German works amount to the third largest group with 8.5% of the
collection. The rest of the major European languages, like French or Spanish have less than 15000 works
each in the collection.
More than 50 thousand publishers have works in the library, but most of the collection is published by
mainstream western academic publishers. Springer published more than 12% of the works in the
collection, followed by the Cambridge University Press, Wiley, Routledge and Oxford University Press,
each having more than 9000 works in the collection.
Most of the collection is relatively recent, more than 70% of the collection being published in 1990 or
after. Despite the recentness of the collection, the electronic availability of the titles in the collection is
limited. While around 80% of the books that had an ISBN number registered in the catalogue3 was
available in print either as a new copy or a second hand one, only about one third of the titles were
available in e-book formats. The mean price of the titles still in print was 62 USD according to the data
gathered from Amazon.com.
The number of works accessed through of Aleph is as impressive as its catalogue. In the three months
between March and June, 2012, on average 24.000 documents were downloaded every day from one of
its half-a-dozen mirrors.4 This means that the number of documents downloaded daily from Aleph is
probably in the 50 to 100.000 range. The library users come from more than 150 different countries. The
biggest users in terms of volume were the Russian Federation, Indonesia, USA, India, Iran, Egypt, China,
Germany and the UK. Meanwhile, many of the highest per-capita users are Central and Eastern European
countries.
What Aleph is and what it is not
Aleph is an example of the library in the post scarcity age. It is founded on the idea that books should no
longer be a scarce resource. Aleph set out to remove both sources of scarcity: the natural source of
3
Market availability data is only available for that 40% of books in the Aleph catalogue that had an ISBN number
on file. The titles without a valid ISBN number tend to be older, Russian language titles, in general with low
expected print and e-book availability.
4
Download data is based on the logs provided by one of the shadow library services which offers the books in
Aleph’s catalogue as well as other works also free and without any restraints or limitations.
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Bodó B. (2015): Libraries in the post-scarcity era.
in: Porsdam (ed): Copyrighting Creativity: Creative values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, Ashgate
scarcity in physical copies is overcome through distributed digitization; the artificial source of scarcity
created by copyright protection is overcome through infringement. The liberation from both constraints is
necessary to create a truly scarcity free environment and to release the potential of the library in the postscarcity age.
Aleph is also an ongoing demonstration of the fact that under the condition of non-scarcity, the library can
be a decentralized, distributed, commons-based institution created and maintained through peer
production (Benkler, 2006). The message of Aleph is clear: users left to their own devices, can produce a
library by themselves for themselves. In fact, users are the library. And when everyone has the means to
digitize, collect, catalogue and share his/her own library, then the library suddenly is everywhere. Small
individual and institutional collections are aggregated into Aleph, which, in turn is constantly fragmented
into smaller, local, individual collections as users download works from the collection. The library is
breathing (Battles, 2004) books in and out, but for the first time, this circulation of books is not a zero
sum game, but a cumulative one: with every cycle the collection grows.
On the other hand Aleph may have lots of books on offer, but it is clear that it is neither universal in its
scope, nor does it fulfill all the critical functions of a library. Most importantly Aleph is disembedded
from the local contexts and communities that usually define the focus of the library. While it relies on the
availability of local digital collections for its growth, it has no means to play an active role in its own
development. The guardians of Aleph can prevent books from entering the collection, but they cannot
pay, ask or force anyone to provide a title if it is missing. Aleph is reliant on the weak copy-protection
technologies of official e-text repositories and the goodwill of individual document submitters when it
comes to the expansion of the collection. This means that the Aleph collection is both fragmented and
biased, and it lacks the necessary safeguards to ensure that it stays either current or relevant.
Aleph, with all its strengths and weaknesses carries an important lesson for the discussions on the future
of libraries. In the next section I’ll try situate these lessons in the wider context of the library in the post
scarcity age.
The future of the library
There is hardly a week without a blog post, a conference, a workshop or an academic paper discussing the
future of libraries. While existing libraries are buzzing with activity, librarians are well aware that they
need to re-define themselves and their institutions, as the book collections around which libraries were
organized slowly go the way the catalogue has gone: into the digital realm. It would be impossible to give
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Bodó B. (2015): Libraries in the post-scarcity era.
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a faithful summary of all the discussions on the future of libraries is such a short contribution. There are,
however, a few threads, to which the story of Aleph may contribute.
Competition
It is very rare to find the two words: libraries and competition in the same sentence. No wonder: libraries
enjoyed a near perfect monopoly in their field of activity. Though there may have been many different
local initiatives that provided free access to books, as a specialized institution to do so, the library was
unmatched and unchallenged. This monopoly position has been lost in a remarkably short period of time
due to the internet and the rapid innovations in the legal e-book distribution markets. Textbooks can be
rented, e-books can be lent, a number of new startups and major sellers offer flat rate access to huge
collections. Expertise that helps navigate the domains of knowledge is abundant, there are multiple
authoritative sources of information and meta-information online. The search box of the library catalog is
only one, and not even the most usable of all the different search boxes one can type a query in5.
Meanwhile there are plenty of physical spaces which offer good coffee, an AC plug, comfortable chairs
and low levels of noise to meet, read and study from local cafes via hacker- and maker spaces, to coworking offices. Many library competitors have access to resources (human, financial, technological and
legal) way beyond the possibilities of even the richest libraries. In addition, publishers control the
copyrights in digital copies which, absent of well fortified statutory limitations and exceptions, prevent
libraries keeping up with the changes in user habits and with the competing commercial services.
Libraries definitely feel the pressure. “Libraries’ offers of materials […] compete with many other offers
that aim to attract the attention of the public. […] It is no longer enough just to make a good collection
available to the public.” (Committee on the Public Libraries in the Knowledge Society, 2010) As a
response, libraries have developed different strategies to cope with this challenge. The common thread in
the various strategy documents is that they try to redefine the library as a node in the vast network of
institutions that provide knowledge, enable learning, facilitate cooperation and initiate dialogues. Some of
the strategic plans redefine the library space as an “independent medium to be developed” (Committee on
the Public Libraries in the Knowledge Society, 2010), and advise libraries to transform themselves into
culture and community centers which establish partnerships with citizens, communities and with other
public and private institutions. Some librarians propose even more radical ways of keeping the library
5
ArXiv, SSRN, RePEc, PubMed Central, Google Scholar, Google Books, Amazon, Mendeley, Citavi,
ResearchGate, Goodreads, LibraryThing, Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, Khan Academy, specialized twitter and other
social media accounts are just a few of the available discovery services.
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relevant by, for example, advocating more opening hours without staff and hosting more user-governed
activities.
In the research library sphere, the Commission on the Future of the Library, a task force set up by the
University of California Berkeley defined the values the university research library will add in the digital
age as “1) Human expertise; 2) Enabling infrastructure; and 3) Preservation and dissemination of
knowledge for future generations.” (Commission on the Future of the Library, 2013). This approach is
from among the more conservative ones, still relying on the hope that libraries can offer something
unique that no one else is able to provide. Others, working at the Association of Research Libraries are
more like their public library counterparts, defining the future role of the research libraries as a “convener
of ‘conversations’ for knowledge construction, an inspiring host; a boundless symposium; an incubator;
a 3rd space both physically and virtually; a scaffold for independence of mind; and a sanctuary for
freedom of expression, a global entrepreneurial engine” (Pendleton-Jullian, Lougee, Wilkin, & Hilton,
2014), in other words, as another important, but in no way unique node in the wider network of
institutions that creates and distributes knowledge.
Despite the differences in priorities, all these recommendations carry the same basic message. The unique
position of libraries in the center of a book-based knowledge economy, on the top of the paper-bound
knowledge hierarchy is about to be lost. As libraries are losing their monopoly of giving low cost, low
restrictions access to books which are scarce by nature, and they are losing their privileged and powerful
position as the guardians of and guides to the knowledge stored in the stacks. If they want to survive, they
need to find their role and position in a network of institutions, where everyone else is engaged in
activities that overlap with the historic functions of the library. Just like the books themselves, the power
that came from the privileged access to books is in part dispersed among the countless nodes in the
knowledge and learning networks, and in part is being captured by those who control the digital rights to
digitize and distribute books in the digital era.
One of the main reasons why libraries are trying to redefine themselves as providers of ancillary services
is because the lack of digital lending rights prevents them from competing on their own traditional home
turf - in giving free access to knowledge. The traditional legal limitations and exceptions to copyright that
enabled libraries to fulfill their role in the analogue world do not apply in the digital realm. In the
European Union, the Infosoc Directive (“Directive 2001/29/EC on the harmonisation of certain aspects of
copyright and related rights in the information society,” 2001) allows for libraries to create digital copies
for preservation, indexing and similar purposes and allows for the display of digital copies on their
premises for research and personal study (Triaille et al., 2013). While in theory these rights provide for
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the core library services in the digital domain, their practical usefulness is rather limited, as off-premises
e-lending of copyrighted works is in most cases6 only possible through individual license agreements with
publishers.
Under such circumstances libraries complain that they cannot fulfill their public interest mission in the
digital era. What libraries are allowed to do under their own under current limitations and exceptions, is
seen as inadequate for what is expected of them. But to do more requires the appropriate e-lending
licenses from rights holders. In many cases, however, libraries simply cannot license digitally for e-lending. In those cases when licensing is possible, they see transaction costs as prohibitively high; they
feel that their bargaining positions vis-à-vis rightholders is unbalanced; they do not see that the license
terms are adapted to libraries’ policies, and they fear that the licenses provide publishers excessive and
undue influence over libraries (Report on the responses to the Public Consultation on the Review of the
EU Copyright Rules, 2013).
What is more, libraries face substantial legal uncertainties even where there are more-or-less well defined
digital library exceptions. In the EU, questions such as whether the analogue lending rights of libraries
extend to e-books, whether an exhaustion of the distribution right is necessary to enjoy the lending
exception, and whether licensing an e-book would exhaust the distribution right are under consideration
by the Court of Justice of the European Union in a Dutch case (Rosati, 2014b). And while in another case
(Case C-117/13 Technische Universität Darmstadt v Eugen Ulmer KG) the CJEU reaffirmed the rights of
European libraries to digitize books in their collection if that is necessary to give access to them in digital
formats on their premises, it also created new uncertainties by stating that libraries may not digitize their
entire collections (Rosati, 2014a).
US libraries face a similar situation, both in terms of the narrowly defined exceptions in which libraries
can operate, and the huge uncertainty regarding the limits of fair use in the digital library context. US
rights holders challenged both Google’s (Authors Guild v Google) and the libraries (Authors Guild v
HathiTrust) rights to digitize copyrighted works. While there seems to be a consensus of courts that the
mass digitization conducted by these institutions was fair use (Diaz, 2013; Rosati, 2014c; Samuelson,
2014), the accessibility of the scanned works is still heavily limited, subject to licenses from publishers,
the existence of print copies at the library and the institutional membership held by prospective readers.
While in the highly competitive US e-book market many commercial intermediaries offer e-lending
6
The notable exception being orphan works which are presumed to be still copyrighted, but without an identifiable
rights owner. In the EU, the Directive 2012/28/EU on certain permitted uses of orphan works in theory eases access
to such works, but in practice its practical impact is limited by the many constraints among its provisions. Lacking
any orphan works legislation and the Google Book Settlement still in limbo, the US is even farther from making
orphan works generally accessible to the public.
13
Bodó B. (2015): Libraries in the post-scarcity era.
in: Porsdam (ed): Copyrighting Creativity: Creative values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, Ashgate
licenses to e-book catalogues of various sizes, these arrangements also carry the danger of a commercial
lock-in of the access to digital works, and render libraries dependent upon the services of commercial
providers who may or may not be the best defenders of public interest (OECD, 2012).
Shadow libraries like Aleph are called into existence by the vacuum that was left behind by the collapse
of libraries in the digital sphere and by the inability of the commercial arrangements to provide adequate
substitute services. Shadow libraries are pooling distributed resources and expertise over the internet, and
use the lack of legal or technological barriers to innovation in the informal sphere to fill in the void left
behind by libraries.
What can Aleph teach us about the future of libraries?
The story of Aleph offers two, closely interrelated considerations for the debate on the future of libraries:
a legal and an organizational one. Aleph operates beyond the limits of legality, as almost all of its
activities are copyright infringing, including the unauthorized digitization of books, the unauthorized
mass downloads from e-text repositories, the unauthorized acts of uploading books to the archive, the
unauthorized distribution of books, and, in most countries, the unauthorized act of users’ downloading
books from the archive. In the debates around copyright infringement, illegality is usually interpreted as a
necessary condition to access works for free. While this is undoubtedly true, the fact that Aleph provides
no-cost access to books seems to be less important than the fact that it provides an access to them in the
first place.
Aleph is a clear indicator of the volume of the demand for current books in digital formats in developed
and in developing countries. The legal digital availability, or rather, unavailability of its catalogue also
demonstrates the limits of the current commercial and library based arrangements that aim to provide low
cost access to books over the internet. As mentioned earlier, Aleph’s catalogue is mostly of recent books,
meaning that 80% of the titles with a valid ISBN number are still in print and available as a new or used
print copy through commercial retailers. What is also clear, that around 66% of these books are yet to be
made available in electronic format. While publishers in theory have a strong incentive to make their most
recent titles available as e-books, they lag behind in doing so.
This might explain why one third of all the e-book downloads in Aleph are from highly developed
Western countries, and two third of these downloads are of books without a kindle version. Having access
to print copies either through libraries or through commercial retailers is simply not enough anymore.
Developing countries are a slightly different case. There, compared to developed countries, twice as many
14
Bodó B. (2015): Libraries in the post-scarcity era.
in: Porsdam (ed): Copyrighting Creativity: Creative values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, Ashgate
of the downloads (17% compared to 8% in developed countries) are of titles that aren’t available in print
at all. Not having access to books in print seems to be a more pressing problem for developing countries
than not having access to electronic copies. Aleph thus fulfills at least two distinct types of demand: in
developed countries it provides access to missing electronic versions, in developing countries it provides
access to missing print copies.
The ability to fulfill an otherwise unfulfilled demand is not the only function of illegality. Copyright
infringement in the case of Aleph has a much more important role: it enables the peer production of the
library. Aleph is an open source library. This means that every resource it uses and every resource it
creates is freely accessible to anyone for use without any further restrictions. This includes the server
code, the database, the catalogue and the collection. The open source nature of Aleph rests on the
ideological claim that the scientific knowledge produced by humanity, mostly through public funds
should be open for anyone to access without any restrictions. Everything else in and around Aleph stems
from this claim, as they replicate the open access logic in all the other aspects of Aleph’s operation. Aleph
uses the peer produced Open Library to fetch book metadata, it uses the bittorrent and ed2k P2P networks
to store and make books accessible, it uses Linux and MySQL to run its code, and it allows its users to
upload books and edit book metadata. As a consequence of its open source nature, anyone can contribute
to the project, and everyone can enjoy its benefits.
It is hard to quantify the impact of this piratical open access library on education, science and research in
various local contexts where Aleph is the prime source of otherwise inaccessible books. But it is
relatively easy to measure the consequences of openness at the level of the Aleph, the library. The
collection of Aleph was created mostly by those individuals and communities who decided to digitize
books by themselves for their own use. While any single individual is only capable of digitizing a few
books at the maximum, the small contributions quickly add up. To digitize the 1.15 million documents in
the Aleph collection would require an investment of several hundred million Euros, and a substantial
subsequent investment in storage, collection management and access provision (Poole, 2010). Compared
to these figures the costs associated with running Aleph is infinitesimal, as it survives on the volunteer
labor of a few individuals, and annual donations in the total value of a few thousand dollars. The hundreds
of thousands who use Aleph on a more or less regular basis have an immense amount of resources, and by
disregarding the copyright laws Aleph is able to tap into those resources and use them for the
development of the library. The value of these resources and of the peer produced library is the difference
between the actual costs associated with Aleph, and the investment that would be required to create
something remotely similar.
15
Bodó B. (2015): Libraries in the post-scarcity era.
in: Porsdam (ed): Copyrighting Creativity: Creative values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, Ashgate
The decentralized, collaborative mass digitization and making available of current, thus most relevant
scientific works is only possible at the moment through massive copyright infringement. It is debatable
whether the copyrighted corpus of scientific works should be completely open, and whether the blatant
disregard of copyrights through which Aleph achieved this openness is the right path towards a more
openly accessible body of scientific knowledge. It is also yet to be measured what effects shadow libraries
may have on the commercial intermediaries and on the health of scientific publishing and science in
general. But Aleph, in any case, is a case study in the potential benefits of open sourcing the library.
Conclusion
If we can take Aleph as an expression of what users around the globe want from a library, then the answer
is that there is a strong need for a universally accessible collection of current, relevant (scientific) books
in restrictions-free electronic formats. Can we expect any single library to provide anything even remotely
similar to that in the foreseeable future? Does such a service have a place in the future of libraries? It is as
hard to imagine the future library with such a service as without.
While the legal and financial obstacles to the creation of a scientific library with as universal reach as
Aleph may be difficult the overcome, other aspects of it may be more easily replicable. The way Aleph
operates demonstrates the amount of material and immaterial resources users are willing to contribute to
build a library that responds to their needs and expectations. If libraries plan to only ‘host’ user-governed
activities, it means that the library is still imagined to be a separate entity from its users. Aleph teaches us
that this separation can be overcome and users can constitute a library. But for that they need
opportunities to participate in the production of the library: they need the right to digitize books and copy
digital books to and from the library, they need the opportunity to participate in the cataloging and
collection building process, they need the opportunity to curate and program the collection. In other
words users need the chance to be librarians in the library if they wish to do so, and so libraries need to be
able to provide access not just to the collection but to their core functions as well. The walls that separate
librarians from library patrons, private and public collections, insiders and outsiders can all prevent the
peer production of the library, and through that, prevent the future that is the closest to what library users
think of as ideal.
16
Bodó B. (2015): Libraries in the post-scarcity era.
in: Porsdam (ed): Copyrighting Creativity: Creative values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, Ashgate
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19
Dockray & Liang
Sharing Instinct: An Annotation of the Social Contract Through Shadow Libraries
2015
# Sean Dockray & Lawrence Liang — Sharing Instinct: An Annotation of the
Social Contract Through Shadow Libraries
 Abdel Kader
Haïdara, a librarian who smuggled hundreds of thousands of manuscripts from
jihadist-occupied Timbuktu to safety in Bamako, stands with ancient volumes
from Timbuktu packed into metal trunks. Photo: Brent Stirton/Getty Images.
_Foederis aequas Dicamus leges _
(Let us make fair terms for the compact.)
—Virgil’s _Aeneid_ , XI
Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.1All excerpts from _The
Social Contract_ are from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _The Social Contract: And,
The First and Second Discourses_, ed. Susan Dunn and Gita May (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2002).
> _June 30, 2015_
>
> _Dear Sean,_
>
> _I have been asked by Raqs Media Collective to contribute to a special
ongoing issue of _e-flux journal _that is part of the Venice Biennale. Raqs’s
section in the issue rethinks Rousseau’s social contract and the possibility
of its being rewritten, as a way of imagining social bonds and solidarities
that can help instigate and affirm a vision of the world as a space of
potential._
>
> _I was wondering if you would join me in a conversation on shadow libraries
and social contracts. The entire universe of the book-sharing communities
seems to offer the possibility of rethinking the terms of the social contract
and its associated terms (consent, general will, private interest, and so on).
While the rise in book sharing is at one level a technological phenomenon (a
library of 100,000 books put in PDF format can presently fit on a one-terabyte
drive that costs less than seventy-five dollars), it is also about how we
think of transformations in social relations mediated by sharing books._
>
> _If the striking image of books in preprint revolution was of being “in
chains,” as Rousseau puts it, I am prompted to wonder about the contemporary
conflict between the digital and mechanisms of control. Are books born free
but are everywhere in chains, or is it the case that they have been set free?
In which case are they writing new social contracts?_
>
> _I was curious about whether you, as the founder of _[
_Aaaaarg.org_](http://aaaaarg.org/) _, had the idea of a social contract in
mind, or even a community, when you started?_
>
> _Lawrence_
**Book I, Chapter VI : The Social Pact**
To find a form of association that may defend and protect with the whole force
of the community the person and property of every associate, and by means of
which each, joining together with all, may nevertheless obey only himself, and
remain as free as before.’’ Such is the fundamental problem to which the
social contract provides the solution.
We can reduce it to the following terms: ‘‘Each of us puts in common his
person and all his power under the supreme direction of the general will; and
in return each member becomes an indivisible part of the whole.’’
> _June 30, 2015_
>
> _Dear Lawrence,_
>
> _I am just listing a few ideas to put things out there and am happy to try
other approaches:_
>
> _—To think about the two kinds of structure that digital libraries take:
either each library is shared by many user-librarians or there is a library
for each person, shared with all the others. It’s a technological design
question, yes, but it also suggests different social contracts?_
>
> _—What is subtracted when we subtract your capacity/right to share a book
with others, when every one of us must approach the market anew to come into
contact with it? But to take a stab at misappropriating the terms you’ve
listed, consent, what libraries do I consent to? Usually the consent needs to
come from the library, in the form of a card or something, but we don’t ask
enough what we want, maybe. Also what about a social contract of books? Does a
book consent to being in a library? What rights does it have or expect?_
>
> _I really loved the math equation Rousseau used to arrive at the general
will: if you subtract the pluses and minuses of particular wills that cancel
each other out, then the general will is the sum of the differences! But why
does the general need to be the lowest common denominator—certainly there are
more appropriate mathematical concepts that have been developed in the past
few hundred years?_
>
> _Sean_
**Book I, Chapter II: Primitive Societies**
This common liberty is a consequence of man’s nature. His first law is to
attend to his own survival, his first concerns are those he owes to himself;
and as soon as he reaches the age of rationality, being sole judge of how to
survive, he becomes his own master.
It is the relation of things and not of men that constitutes war; and since
the state of war cannot arise from simple personal relations, but only from
real relations, private war—war between man and man—cannot exist either in the
state of nature, where there is no settled ownership, or in the social state,
where everything is under the authority of the laws.
> _July 1, 2015_
>
> _Dear Lawrence,_
>
> _Unlike a logic of exchange, or of offer and return with its demands for
reciprocity, the logic of sharing doesn’t ask its members for anything in
return. There are no guarantees that the one who gives a book will get back
anything, whether that is money, an equivalent book, or even a token of
gratitude. Similarly, there is nothing to prevent someone from taking without
giving. I think a logic of sharing will look positively illogical across the
course of its existence. But to me, this is part of the appeal: that it can
accommodate behaviors and relationships that might be impossible within the
market._
>
> _But if there is a lack of a contract governing specific exchanges, then
there is something at another level that defines and organizes the space of
sharing, that governs its boundaries, and that establishes inclusions and
exclusions. Is this something ethics? Identity? Already I am appealing to
something that itself would be shared, and would this sharing precede the
material sharing of, for example, a library? Or would the shared
ethics/identity/whatever be a symptom of the practice of sharing? Well, this
is perhaps the conclusion that anthropologists might come to when trying to
explain the sharing practices of hunter-gatherer societies, but a library?_
>
> _Sean_
>
>
>
> _July 1, 2015_
>
> _Hi Sean,_
>
> _I liked your question of what might account for a sharing instinct when it
comes to books, and whether we appeal to something that already exists as a
shared ethics or identity, or is sharing the basis of a shared
ethics/identity? I have to say that while I have never thought of my own book-
collecting through the analogy of hunter-gatherers, the more I think about it,
the more sense it makes to me. Linguistically we always speak of going on book
hunts and my daily trawling through the various shadow libraries online does
seem to function by way of a hunting-gathering mentality._
>
> _Often I download books I know that I will never personally read because I
know that it may either be of interest to someone else, or that the place of a
library is the cave where one gathers what one has hunted down, not just for
oneself but for others. I also like that we are using so-called primitive
metaphors to account for twenty-first-century digital practices, because it
allows us the possibility of linking these practices to a primal instinct of
sharing, which precedes our encounter with the social norms that classify and
partition that instinct (legal, illegal, authorized, and so on). _
>
> _I don’t know if you remember the meeting that we had in Mumbai a few years
ago—among the other participants, we had an academic from Delhi as an
interlocutor. He expressed an absolute terror at what he saw as the “tyranny
of availability” in online libraries. In light of the immense number of books
available in electronic copies and on our computers or hard discs, he felt
overwhelmed and compared his discomfort with that of being inside a large
library and not knowing what to do. Interestingly, he regularly writes asking
me to supply him with books that he can’t find or does not have access to._
>
> _This got me thinking about the idea of a library and what it may mean, in
its classical sense and its digital sense. An encounter with any library,
especially when it manifests itself physically, is one where you encounter
your own finitude in the face of what seems like the infinity of knowledge.
But personally this sense of awe has also been tinged with an immense
excitement and possibility. The head rush of wanting to jump from a book on
forgotten swear words to an intellectual biography of Benjamin, and the
tingling anticipation as you walk out of the library with ten books, captures
for me more than any other experience the essence of the word potential._
>
> _I have a modest personal library of around four thousand books, which I
know will be kind of difficult for me to finish in my lifetime even if I stop
adding any new books, and yet the impulse to add books to our unending list
never fades. And if you think about this in terms of the number of books that
reside on our computers, then the idea of using numbers becomes a little
pointless, and we need some other way or measure to make sense of our
experience._
>
> _Lawrence_
**Book I, Chapter VII: The Sovereign**
Every individual can, as a man, have a particular will contrary to, or
divergent from, the general will which he has as a citizen; his private
interest may appear to him quite different from the common interest; his
absolute and naturally independent existence may make him envisage what he
owes to the common cause as a gratuitous contribution, the loss of which would
be less harmful to others than the payment of it would be onerous to him.
> _July 12, 2015_
>
> _Hi Sean,_
>
> _There is no symbol that to my mind captures the regulated nature of the
library more than that of the board that hushes you with its capitalized
SILENCE. Marianne Constable says, “One can acknowledge the figure of silence
in the library and its persistence, even as one may wonder what a silent
library would be, whether libraries ever are silent, and what the various
silences—if any—in a library could be.”_
>
> _If I had to think about the nature of the social contract and the
possibilities of its rewriting from the site of the library one encounters
another set of silent rules and norms. If social contracts are narrative
compacts that establish a political community under the sign of a sovereign
collective called the people, libraries also aspire to establish an authority
in the name of the readers and to that extent they share a common constitutive
character. But just as there is a foundational scandal of absence at the heart
of the social contract that presumes our collective consent (what Derrida
describes as the absence of the people and the presence of their signature)
there seems to be a similar silence in the world of libraries where readers
rarely determine the architecture, the logic, or the rules of the library._
>
> _So libraries have often mirrored, rather than inverted, power relations
that underlie the social contracts that they almost underwrite._ _In contrast
I am wondering if the various shadow libraries that have burgeoned online, the
portable personal libraries that are shared offline: Whether all of them
reimagine the social contract of libraries, and try to create a more insurgent
imagination of the library?_
>
> _Lawrence_
>
>
>
> _July 13, 2015_
>
> _Hi Lawrence,_
>
> _As you know, I’m very interested in structures that allow the people within
ways to meaningfully reconfigure them. This is distinct from participation or
interaction, where the structures are inquisitive or responsive, but not
fundamentally changeable._
>
> _I appreciate the idea that a library might have, not just a collection of
books or a system of organizing, but its own social contract. In the case of
Aaaaarg, as you noticed, it is not explicit. Not only is there no statement as
such, there was never a process prior to the library in which something like a
social contract was designed._
>
> _I did ask users to write out a short statement of their reason for joining
Aaaaarg and have around fifty thousand of these expressions of intention. I
think it’s more interesting to think of the social contract, or at least a
"general will," in terms of those. If Rousseau distinguished between the will
of all and the general will, in a way that could be illustrated by the catalog
of reasons for joining Aaaaarg. Whereas the will of all might be a sum of all
the reasons, the general will would be the sum of what remains after you "take
away the pluses and minuses that cancel one another." I haven’t done the math,
but I don’t think the general will, the general reason, goes beyond a desire
for access._
>
> _To summarize a few significant groupings:_
>
> _—To think outside institutions; _
> _—To find things that one cannot find; _
> _—To have a place to share things;_
> _—To act out a position against intellectual property; _
> _—A love of books (in whatever form)._
>
> _What I do see as common across these groupings is that the desire for
access is, more specifically, a desire to have a relationship with texts and
others that is not mediated by market relations._
>
> _In my original conception of the site, it would be something like a
collective commonplace. Like commonplacing, the excerpts that people would
keep were those parts of texts that seemed particularly useful, that produced
a spark that one wanted to share. This is important: that it was the
experience of being electrified in some way that people were sharing and not a
book as such. Over time, things changed and the shared objects became more
complete so to say, and less “subjective,” but I hope that there is still that
spark. But, at this point, I realize that I am just another one of the many
wills, and just one designer of whatever social contract is underlying the
library._
>
> _So, again—What is the social contract? It wasn’t determined in advance and
it is not written in any about section or FAQ. I would say that it is, like
the library itself, something that is growing and evolving over time, wouldn’t
you?_
>
> _Sean_
**Book II, Chapter VIII : The People**
As an architect, before erecting a large edifice, examines and tests the soil
in order to see whether it can support the weight, so a wise lawgiver does not
begin by drawing up laws that are good in themselves, but considers first
whether the people for whom he designs them are fit to maintain them.
> _July 15, 2015_
>
> _Lawrence,_
>
> _There are many different ways of organizing a library, of structuring it,
and it’s the same for online libraries. I think the most interesting
conversation would not be to bemoan the digital for overloading our ability to
be discerning, or to criticize it for not conforming to the kind of economy
that we expected publishing to have, or become nostalgic for book smells; but
to actually really wonder what it is that could make these libraries great,
places that will be missed in the future if they go away. To me, this is the
most depressing thing about the unfortunate fact that digital shadow libraries
have to operate somewhat below the radar: it introduces a precariousness that
doesn’t allow imagination to really expand, as it becomes stuck on techniques
of evasion, distribution, and redundancy. But what does it mean when a library
functions transnationally? When its contents can be searched? When reading
interfaces aren’t bound by the book form? When its contents can be referenced
from anywhere?_
>
> _What I wanted when building Aaaaarg.org the first time was to make it
useful, in the absolute fullest sense of the word, something for people who
saw books not just as things you buy to read because they’re enjoyable, but as
things you need to have a sense of self, of orientation in the world, to learn
your language and join in the conversation you are a part of—a library for
people who related to books like that._
>
> _Sean_
>
>
>
> _July 17, 2015_
>
> _Hi Sean_,
>
> _To pick up on the reasons that people give for joining Aaaaarg.org: even
though Aaaaarg.org is not bound by a social contract, we do see the
outlines—through common interests and motivations—of a fuzzy sense of a
community. And the thing with fuzzy communities is that they don’t necessarily
need to be defined with the same clarity as enumerated communities, like
nations, do. Sudipta Kaviraj, who used the term fuzzy communities, also speaks
of a “narrative contract”—perhaps a useful way to think about how to make
sense of the bibliophilic motivations and intentions, or what you describe as
the “desire to have a relationship with texts and others that is not mediated
by market relations.”_
>
> _This seems a perfectly reasonable motivation except that it is one that
would be deemed impossible at the very least, and absurd at worst by those for
whom the world of books and ideas can only be mediated by the market. And it’s
this idea of the absurd and the illogical that I would like to think a little
bit about via the idea of the ludic, a term that I think might be useful to
deploy while thinking of ways of rewriting the social contract: a ludic
contract, if you will, entered into through routes allowed by ludic libraries.
_
>
> _If we trace the word ludic back to its French and Latin roots, we find it
going back to the idea of playing (from Latin _ludere _"to play" or _ludique
_“spontaneously playful”), but today it has mutated into most popular usage
(ludicrous) generally used in relation to an idea that is so impossible it
seems absurd. And more often than not the term conveys an absurdity associated
with a deviation from well-established norms including utility, seriousness,
purpose, and property._
>
> _But what if our participation in various forms of book sharing was less
like an invitation to enter a social contract, and more like an invitation to
play? But play what, you may ask, since the term play has childish and
sometimes frivolous connotation to it? And we are talking here about serious
business. Gadamer proposes that rather than the idea of fun and games, we can
think with the analogy of a cycle, suggesting that it was important not to
tighten the nuts on the axle too much, or else the wheel could not turn. “It
has to have some play in it … and not too much play, or the wheel will fall
off. It was all about _spielraum _, ‘play-room,’ some room for play. It needs
space.” _
>
> _The ludic, or the invitation to the ludic in this account, is first and
foremost a necessary relief—just as playing is—from constraining situations
and circumstances. They could be physical, monetary, or out of sheer
nonavailability (thus the desire for access could be thought of as a tactical
maneuver to create openings). They could be philosophical constraints
(epistemological, disciplinary), social constraints (divisions of class, work,
and leisure time). At any rate all efforts at participating in shadow
libraries seem propelled by an instinct to exceed the boundaries of the self
however defined, and to make some room for play or to create a “ludic
spaciousness,” as it were. _
>
> _The spatial metaphor is also related to the bounded/unbounded (another name
for freedom I guess) and to the extent that the unbounded allows us a way into
our impossible selves; they share a space with dreams, but rarely do we think
of the violation of the right to access as fundamentally being a violation of
our right to dream. Your compilation of the reasons that people wanted to join
Aaaaarg may well be thought of as an archive of one-sentence-long dreams of
the ludic library. _
>
> _If for Bachelard the house protects the dreamer, the library for me is a
ludic shelter, which brings me back to an interesting coincidence. I don’t
know what it is that prompted you to choose the name Aaaaarg.org; I don’t know
if you are aware it binds you irrevocably (to use the legal language of
contracts) with one of the very few theorists of the ludic, the Dutch
philosopher Johan Huizinga, who coined the word _homo ludens _(as against the
more functional, scientific homo sapiens or functional homo faber). In his
1938 text Huizinga observes that “the fun of playing, resists all analysis,
all logical interpretation,” and as a concept it cannot be reduced to any
other mental category. He feels that no language really has an exact
equivalent to the word fun but the closest he comes in his own language is the
Dutch word _aardigkeit, _so the line between aaaarg and aaard may have well
have been dreamt of before Aaaaarg.org even started._
>
> _More soon,_
>
> _Lawrence_
×
[](http://conversations.e-flux.com/t
/superconversations-day-73-mohammad-salemy-responds-to-sean-dockray-lawrence-
liang-sharing-instinct-an-annotation-of-the-social-contract-through-shadow-
libraries/2244 "Sharing Instinct: An Annotation of the Social Contract Through
Shadow Libraries @ e-flux Conversations")
This pamphlet is published in a series
of 7 as part of the Radical Open
Access II – The Ethics of Care
conference, which took place June
26-27 at Coventry University. More
information about this conference
and about the contributors to this
pamphlet can be found at:
http://radicaloa.co.uk/conferences/
ROA2
This pamphlet was made possible due
to generous funding from the arts
and humanities research studio, The
Post Office, a project of Coventry
University’s Centre for Postdigital
Cultures and due to the combined
efforts of authors, editors, designers
and printers.
Table of Contents
Guerrilla Open Access:
Terms Of Struggle
Memory of the World
Page 4
Recursive Publics and Open Access
Christopher Kelty
Page 6
Own Nothing
Balazs Bodo
Page 16
What if We Aren't the Only
Guerrillas Out There?
Laurie Allen
Page 26
Guerilla
Open
Access:
Terms Of
Struggle
In the 1990s, the Internet offered a horizon from which to imagine what society
could become, promising autonomy and self-organization next to redistribution of
wealth and collectivized means of production. While the former was in line with the
dominant ideology of freedom, the latter ran contrary to the expanding enclosures
in capitalist globalization. This antagonism has led to epochal copyfights, where free
software and piracy kept the promise of radical commoning alive.
Free software, as Christopher Kelty writes in this pamphlet, provided a model ‘of a
shared, collective, process of making software, hardware and infrastructures that
cannot be appropriated by others’. Well into the 2000s, it served as an inspiration
for global free culture and open access movements who were speculating that
distributed infrastructures of knowledge production could be built, as the Internet
was, on top of free software.
For a moment, the hybrid world of ad-financed Internet giants—sharing code,
advocating open standards and interoperability—and users empowered by these
services, convinced almost everyone that a new reading/writing culture was
possible. Not long after the crash of 2008, these disruptors, now wary monopolists,
began to ingest smaller disruptors and close off their platforms. There was still
free software somewhere underneath, but without the ‘original sense of shared,
collective, process’. So, as Kelty suggests, it was hard to imagine that for-profit
academic publishers wouldn't try the same with open access.
Heeding Aaron Swartz’s call to civil disobedience, Guerrilla Open Access has
emerged out of the outrage over digitally-enabled enclosure of knowledge that
has allowed these for-profit academic publishers to appropriate extreme profits
that stand in stark contrast to the cuts, precarity, student debt and asymmetries
of access in education. Shadow libraries stood in for the access denied to public
libraries, drastically reducing global asymmetries in the process.
4
This radicalization of access has changed how publications
travel across time and space. Digital archiving, cataloging and
sharing is transforming what we once considered as private
libraries. Amateur librarianship is becoming public shadow
librarianship. Hybrid use, as poetically unpacked in Balazs
Bodo's reflection on his own personal library, is now entangling
print and digital in novel ways. And, as he warns, the terrain
of antagonism is shifting. While for-profit publishers are
seemingly conceding to Guerrilla Open Access, they are
opening new territories: platforms centralizing data, metrics
and workflows, subsuming academic autonomy into new
processes of value extraction.
The 2010s brought us hope and then realization how little
digital networks could help revolutionary movements. The
redistribution toward the wealthy, assisted by digitization, has
eroded institutions of solidarity. The embrace of privilege—
marked by misogyny, racism and xenophobia—this has catalyzed
is nowhere more evident than in the climate denialism of the
Trump administration. Guerrilla archiving of US government
climate change datasets, as recounted by Laurie Allen,
indicates that more technological innovation simply won't do
away with the 'post-truth' and that our institutions might be in
need of revision, replacement and repair.
As the contributions to this pamphlet indicate, the terms
of struggle have shifted: not only do we have to continue
defending our shadow libraries, but we need to take back the
autonomy of knowledge production and rebuild institutional
grounds of solidarity.
Memory of the World
http://memoryoftheworld.org
5
Recursive
Publics and
Open Access
Christopher
Kelty
Ten years ago, I published a book calledTwo Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free
Software (Kelty 2008).1 Duke University Press and my editor Ken Wissoker were
enthusiastically accommodating of my demands to make the book freely and openly
available. They also played along with my desire to release the 'source code' of the
book (i.e. HTML files of the chapters), and to compare the data on readers of the
open version to print customers. It was a moment of exploration for both scholarly
presses and for me. At the time, few authors were doing this other than Yochai Benkler
(2007) and Cory Doctorow2, both activists and advocates for free software and open
access (OA), much as I have been. We all shared, I think, a certain fanaticism of the
convert that came from recognizing free software as an historically new, and radically
different mode of organizing economic and political activity. Two Bits gave me a way
to talk not only about free software, but about OA and the politics of the university
(Kelty et al. 2008; Kelty 2014). Ten years later, I admit to a certain pessimism at the
way things have turned out. The promise of free software has foundered, though not
disappeared, and the question of what it means to achieve the goals of OA has been
swamped by concerns about costs, arcane details of repositories and versioning, and
ritual offerings to the metrics God.
When I wrote Two Bits, it was obvious to me that the collectives who built free
software were essential to the very structure and operation of a standardized
Internet. Today, free software and 'open source' refer to dramatically different
constellations of practice and people. Free software gathers around itself those
committed to the original sense of a shared, collective, process of making software,
hardware and infrastructures that cannot be appropriated by others. In political
terms, I have always identified free software with a very specific, updated, version
of classical Millian liberalism. It sustains a belief in the capacity for collective action
and rational thought as aids to establishing a flourishing human livelihood. Yet it
also preserves an outdated blind faith in the automatic functioning of meritorious
speech, that the best ideas will inevitably rise to the top. It is an updated classical
liberalism that saw in software and networks a new place to resist the tyranny of the
conventional and the taken for granted.
6
Christopher Kelty
By contrast, open source has come to mean something quite different: an ecosystem
controlled by an oligopoly of firms which maintains a shared pool of components and
frameworks that lower the costs of education, training, and software creation in the
service of establishing winner-take-all platforms. These are built on open source, but
they do not carry the principles of freedom or openness all the way through to the
platforms themselves.3 What open source has become is now almost the opposite of
free software—it is authoritarian, plutocratic, and nepotistic, everything liberalism
wanted to resist. For example, precarious labor and platforms such as Uber or Task
Rabbit are built upon and rely on the fruits of the labor of 'open source', but the
platforms that result do not follow the same principles—they are not open or free
in any meaningful sense—to say nothing of the Uber drivers or task rabbits who live
by the platforms.
Does OA face the same problem? In part, my desire to 'free the source' of my book
grew out of the unfinished business of digitizing the scholarly record. It is an irony
that much of the work that went into designing the Internet at its outset in the
1980s, such as gopher, WAIS, and the HTML of CERN, was conducted in the name
of the digital transformation of the library. But by 2007, these aims were swamped
by attempts to transform the Internet into a giant factory of data extraction. Even
in 2006-7 it was clear that this unfinished business of digitizing the scholarly record
was going to become a problem—both because it was being overshadowed by other
concerns, and because of the danger it would eventually be subjected to the very
platformization underway in other realms.
Because if the platform capitalism of today has ended up being parasitic on the
free software that enabled it, then why would this not also be true of scholarship
more generally? Are we not witnessing a transition to a world where scholarship
is directed—in its very content and organization—towards the profitability of the
platforms that ostensibly serve it?4 Is it not possible that the platforms created to
'serve science'—Elsevier's increasing acquisition of tools to control the entire lifecycle of research, or ResearchGate's ambition to become the single source for all
academics to network and share research—that these platforms might actually end up
warping the very content of scholarly production in the service of their profitability?
To put this even more clearly: OA has come to exist and scholarship is more available
and more widely distributed than ever before. But, scholars now have less control,
and have taken less responsibility for the means of production of scientific research,
its circulation, and perhaps even the content of that science.
Recursive Publics and Open Access
7
The Method of Modulation
When I wrote Two Bits I organized the argument around the idea of modulation:
free software is simply one assemblage of technologies, practices, and people
aimed at resolving certain problems regarding the relationship between knowledge
(or software tools related to knowledge) and power (Hacking 2004; Rabinow
2003). Free software as such was and still is changing as each of its elements
evolve or are recombined. Because OA derives some of its practices directly from
free software, it is possible to observe how these different elements have been
worked over in the recent past, as well as how new and surprising elements are
combined with OA to transform it. Looking back on the elements I identified as
central to free software, one can ask: how is OA different, and what new elements
are modulating it into something possibly unrecognizable?
Sharing source code
Shareable source code was a concrete and necessary achievement for free
software to be possible. Similarly, the necessary ability to circulate digital texts
is a significant achievement—but such texts are shareable in a much different way.
For source code, computable streams of text are everything—anything else is a
'blob' like an image, a video or any binary file. But scholarly texts are blobs: Word or
Portable Document Format (PDF) files. What's more, while software programmers
may love 'source code', academics generally hate it—anything less than the final,
typeset version is considered unfinished (see e.g. the endless disputes over
'author's final versions' plaguing OA).5 Finality is important. Modifiability of a text,
especially in the humanities and social sciences, is acceptable only when it is an
experiment of some kind.
In a sense, the source code of science is not a code at all, but a more abstract set
of relations between concepts, theories, tools, methods, and the disciplines and
networks of people who operate with them, critique them, extend them and try to
maintain control over them even as they are shared within these communities.
avoid the waste of 'reinventing the wheel' and of pathological
competition, allowing instead modular, reusable parts that
could be modified and recombined to build better things in an
upward spiral of innovation. The 1980s ideas of modularity,
modifiability, abstraction barriers, interchangeable units
have been essential to the creation of digital infrastructures.
To propose an 'open science' thus modulates this definition—
and the idea works in some sciences better than others.
Aside from the obviously different commercial contexts,
philosophers and literary theorists just don't think about
openness this way—theories and arguments may be used
as building blocks, but they are not modular in quite the
same way. Only the free circulation of the work, whether
for recombination or for reference and critique, remains a
sine qua non of the theory of openness proposed there. It
is opposed to a system where it is explicit that only certain
people have access to the texts (whether that be through
limitations of secrecy, or limitations on intellectual property,
or an implicit elitism).
Writing and using copyright licenses
Of all the components of free software that I analyzed, this
is the one practice that remains the least transformed—OA
texts use the same CC licenses pioneered in 2001, which
were a direct descendant of free software licenses.
For free software to make sense as a solution, those involved first had to
characterize the problem it solved—and they did so by identifying a pathology in
the worlds of corporate capitalism and engineering in the 1980s: that computer
corporations were closed organizations who re-invented basic tools and
infrastructures in a race to dominate a market. An 'open system,' by contrast, would
A novel modulation of these licenses is the OA policies (the
embrace of OA in Brazil for instance, or the spread of OA
Policies starting with Harvard and the University of California,
and extending to the EU Mandate from 2008 forward). Today
the ability to control the circulation of a text with IP rights is
far less economically central to the strategies of publishers
than it was in 2007, even if they persist in attempting to do
so. At the same time, funders, states, and universities have all
adopted patchwork policies intended to both sustain green
OA, and push publishers to innovate their own business
models in gold and hybrid OA. While green OA is a significant
success on paper, the actual use of it to circulate work pales
8
Recursive Publics and Open Access
Defining openness
Christopher Kelty
9
in comparison to the commercial control of circulation on the
one hand, and the increasing success of shadow libraries on
the other. Repositories have sprung up in every shape and
form, but they remain largely ad hoc, poorly coordinated, and
underfunded solutions to the problem of OA.
Coordinating collaborations
The collective activity of free software is ultimately the
most significant of its achievements—marrying a form of
intensive small-scale interaction amongst programmers,
with sophisticated software for managing complex objects
(version control and GitHub-like sites). There has been
constant innovation in these tools for controlling, measuring,
testing, and maintaining software.
By contrast, the collective activity of scholarship is still
largely a pre-modern affair. It is coordinated largely by the
idea of 'writing an article together' and not by working
to maintain some larger map of what a research topic,
community, or discipline has explored—what has worked and
what has not.
This focus on the coordination of collaboration seemed to
me to be one of the key advantages of free software, but it
has turned out to be almost totally absent from the practice
or discussion of OA. Collaboration and the recombination of
elements of scholarly practice obviously happens, but it does
not depend on OA in any systematic way: there is only the
counterfactual that without it, many different kinds of people
are excluded from collaboration or even simple participation
in, scholarship, something that most active scholars are
willfully ignorant of.
Fomenting a movement
I demoted the idea of a social movement to merely one
component of the success of free software, rather than let
it be—as most social scientists would have it—the principal
container for free software. They are not the whole story.
10
Christopher Kelty
Is there an OA movement? Yes and no. Librarians remain
the most activist and organized. The handful of academics
who care about it have shifted to caring about it in primarily
a bureaucratic sense, forsaking the cross-organizational
aspects of a movement in favor of activism within universities
(to which I plead guilty). But this transformation forsakes
the need for addressing the collective, collaborative
responsibility for scholarship in favor of letting individual
academics, departments, and disciplines be the focus for
such debates.
By contrast, the publishing industry works with a
phantasmatic idea of both an OA 'movement' and of the actual
practices of scholarship—they too defer, in speech if not in
practice, to the academics themselves, but at the same time
must create tools, innovate processes, establish procedures,
acquire tools and companies and so on in an effort to capture
these phantasms and to prevent academics from collectively
doing so on their own.
And what new components? The five above were central to
free software, but OA has other components that are arguably
more important to its organization and transformation.
Money, i.e. library budgets
Central to almost all of the politics and debates about OA
is the political economy of publication. From the 'bundles'
debates of the 1990s to the gold/green debates of the 2010s,
the sole source of money for publication long ago shifted into
the library budget. The relationship that library budgets
have to other parts of the political economy of research
(funding for research itself, debates about tenured/nontenured, adjunct and other temporary salary structures) has
shifted as a result of the demand for OA, leading libraries
to re-conceptualize themselves as potential publishers, and
publishers to re-conceptualize themselves as serving 'life
cycles' or 'pipeline' of research, not just its dissemination.
Recursive Publics and Open Access
11
Metrics
More than anything, OA is promoted as a way to continue
to feed the metrics God. OA means more citations, more
easily computable data, and more visible uses and re-uses of
publications (as well as 'open data' itself, when conceived of
as product and not measure). The innovations in the world
of metrics—from the quiet expansion of the platforms of the
publishers, to the invention of 'alt metrics', to the enthusiasm
of 'open science' for metrics-driven scientific methods—forms
a core feature of what 'OA' is today, in a way that was not true
of free software before it, where metrics concerning users,
downloads, commits, or lines of code were always after-thefact measures of quality, and not constitutive ones.
Other components of this sort might be proposed, but the
main point is to resist to clutch OA as if it were the beating
heart of a social transformation in science, as if it were a
thing that must exist, rather than a configuration of elements
at a moment in time. OA was a solution—but it is too easy to
lose sight of the problem.
Open Access without Recursive Publics
When we no longer have any commons, but only platforms,
will we still have knowledge as we know it? This is a question
at the heart of research in the philosophy and sociology
of knowledge—not just a concern for activism or social
movements. If knowledge is socially produced and maintained,
then the nature of the social bond surely matters to the
nature of that knowledge. This is not so different than asking
whether we will still have labor or work, as we have long known
it, in an age of precarity? What is the knowledge equivalent of
precarity (i.e. not just the existence of precarious knowledge
workers, but a kind of precarious knowledge as such)?
knowledge and power is shifting dramatically, because the costs—and the stakes—
of producing high quality, authoritative knowledge have also shifted. It is not so
powerful any longer; science does not speak truth to power because truth is no
longer so obviously important to power.
Although this is a pessimistic portrait, it may also be a sign of something yet to
come. Free software as a community, has been and still sometimes is critiqued as
being an exclusionary space of white male sociality (Nafus 2012; Massanari 2016;
Ford and Wajcman 2017; Reagle 2013). I think this critique is true, but it is less a
problem of identity than it is a pathology of a certain form of liberalism: a form that
demands that merit consists only in the content of the things we say (whether in
a political argument, a scientific paper, or a piece of code), and not in the ways we
say them, or who is encouraged to say them and who is encouraged to remain silent
(Dunbar-Hester 2014).
One might, as a result, choose to throw out liberalism altogether as a broken
philosophy of governance and liberation. But it might also be an opportunity to
focus much more specifically on a particular problem of liberalism, one that the
discourse of OA also relies on to a large extent. Perhaps it is not the case that
merit derives solely from the content of utterances freely and openly circulated,
but also from the ways in which they are uttered, and the dignity of the people
who utter them. An OA (or a free software) that embraced that principle would
demand that we pay attention to different problems: how are our platforms,
infrastructures, tools organized and built to support not just the circulation of
putatively true statements, but the ability to say them in situated and particular
ways, with respect for the dignity of who is saying them, and with the freedom to
explore the limits of that kind of liberalism, should we be so lucky to achieve it.
Do we not already see the evidence of this in the 'posttruth' of fake news, or the deliberate refusal by those in
power to countenance evidence, truth, or established
systems of argument and debate? The relationship between
12
Christopher Kelty
Recursive Publics and Open Access
13
References
¹ https://twobits.net/download/index.html
Benkler, Yochai. 2007. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets
and Freedom. Yale University Press.
Dunbar-Hester, Christina. 2014. Low Power to the People: Pirates, Protest, and Politics in
FM Radio Activism. MIT Press.
Ford, Heather, and Judy Wajcman. 2017. “‘Anyone Can Edit’, Not Everyone Does:
Wikipedia’s Infrastructure and the Gender Gap”. Social Studies of Science 47 (4):
511–527. doi:10.1177/0306312717692172.
Hacking, I. 2004. Historical Ontology. Harvard University Press.
Kelty, Christopher M. 2014. “Beyond Copyright and Technology: What Open Access Can
Tell Us About Precarity, Authority, Innovation, and Automation in the University
Today”. Cultural Anthropology 29 (2): 203–215. doi:10.14506/ca29.2.02.
——— . 2008. Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software. Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press.
Kelty, Christopher M., et al. 2008. “Anthropology In/of Circulation: a Discussion”. Cultural
Anthropology 23 (3).
Massanari, Adrienne. 2016. “#gamergate and the Fappening: How Reddit’s Algorithm,
Governance, and Culture Support Toxic Technocultures”. New Media & Society 19 (3):
329–346. doi:10.1177/1461444815608807.
Nafus, Dawn. 2012. “‘Patches don’t have gender’: What is not open in open source
software”. New Media & Society 14, no. 4: 669–683. Visited on 04/01/2014. http://
doi:10.1177/1461444811422887.
Rabinow, Paul. 2003. Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment. Princeton
University Press.
Reagle, Joseph. 2013. “"Free As in Sexist?" Free Culture and the Gender Gap”. First
Monday 18 (1). doi:10.5210/fm.v18i1.4291.
² https://craphound.com/
³ For example, Platform Cooperativism
https://platform.coop/directory
See for example the figure from ’Rent
Seeking by Elsevier,’ by Alejandro Posada
and George Chen (http://knowledgegap.
org/index.php/sub-projects/rent-seekingand-financialization-of-the-academicpublishing-industr preliminary-findings/)
4
See Sherpa/Romeo
http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/index.php
5
14
Christopher Kelty
Recursive Publics and Open Access
15
Own
Nothing
the contexts we were fleeing from. We made a choice to leave
behind the history, the discourses, the problems and the pain
that accumulated in the books of our library. I knew exactly
what it was I didn’t want to teach to my children once we moved.
So we did not move the books. We pretended that we would
never have to think about what this decision really meant. Up
until today. This year we needed to empty the study with the
shelves. So I’m standing in our library now, the dust covering
my face, my hands, my clothes. In the middle of the floor there
are three big crates and one small box. The small box swallows
what we’ll ultimately take with us, the books I want to show to
my son when he gets older, in case he still wants to read. One of
the big crates will be taken away by the antiquarian. The other
will be given to the school library next door. The third is the
wastebasket, where everything else will ultimately go.
Balazs
Bodo
Flow My Tears
My tears cut deep grooves into the dust on my face. Drip, drip,
drop, they hit the floor and disappear among the torn pages
scattered on the floor.
This year it dawned on us that we cannot postpone it any longer:
our personal library has to go. Our family moved countries
more than half a decade ago, we switched cultures, languages,
and chose another future. But the past, in the form of a few
thousand books in our personal library, was still neatly stacked
in our old apartment, patiently waiting, books that we bought
and enjoyed — and forgot; books that we bought and never
opened; books that we inherited from long-dead parents and
half-forgotten friends. Some of them were important. Others
were relevant at one point but no longer, yet they still reminded
us who we once were.
When we moved, we took no more than two suitcases of personal
belongings. The books were left behind. The library was like
a sick child or an ailing parent, it hung over our heads like an
unspoken threat, a curse. It was clear that sooner or later
something had to be done about it, but none of the options
available offered any consolation. It made no sense to move
three thousand books to the other side of this continent. We
decided to emigrate, and not to take our past with us, abandon
16
Balazs Bodo
Drip, drip, drip, my tears flow as I throw the books into this
last crate, drip, drip, drop. Sometimes I look at my partner,
working next to me, and I can see on her face that she is going
through the same emotions. I sometimes catch the sight of
her trembling hand, hesitating for a split second where a book
should ultimately go, whether we could, whether we should
save that particular one, because… But we either save them all
or we are as ruthless as all those millions of people throughout
history, who had an hour to pack their two suitcases before they
needed to leave. Do we truly need this book? Is this a book we’ll
want to read? Is this book an inseparable part of our identity?
Did we miss this book at all in the last five years? Is this a text
I want to preserve for the future, for potential grandchildren
who may not speak my mother tongue at all? What is the function
of the book? What is the function of this particular book in my
life? Why am I hesitating throwing it out? Why should I hesitate
at all? Drop, drop, drop, a decision has been made. Drop, drop,
drop, books are falling to the bottom of the crates.
We are killers, gutting our library. We are like the half-drown
sailor, who got entangled in the ropes, and went down with the
ship, and who now frantically tries to cut himself free from the
detritus that prevents him to reach the freedom of the surface,
the sunlight and the air.
Own Nothing
17
advantages of a fully digital book future. What I see now is the emergence of a strange
and shapeshifting-hybrid of diverse physical and electronic objects and practices,
where the relative strengths and weaknesses of these different formats nicely
complement each other.
This dawned on me after we had moved into an apartment without a bookshelf. I grew
up in a flat that housed my parents’ extensive book collection. I knew the books by their
cover and from time to time something made me want to take it from the shelf, open
it and read it. This is how I discovered many of my favorite books and writers. With
the e-reader, and some of the best shadow libraries at hand, I felt the same at first. I
felt liberated. I could experiment without cost or risk, I could start—or stop—a book,
I didn’t have to consider the cost of buying and storing a book that was ultimately
not meant for me. I could enjoy the books without having to carry the burden and
responsibility of ownership.
Own Nothing, Have Everything
Do you remember Napster’s slogan after it went legit, trying to transform itself into
a legal music service around 2005? ‘Own nothing, have everything’ – that was the
headline that was supposed to sell legal streaming music. How stupid, I thought. How
could you possibly think that lack of ownership would be a good selling point? What
does it even mean to ‘have everything’ without ownership? And why on earth would
not everyone want to own the most important constituents of their own self, their
own identity? The things I read, the things I sing, make me who I am. Why wouldn’t I
want to own these things?
How revolutionary this idea had been I reflected as I watched the local homeless folks
filling up their sacks with the remains of my library. How happy I would be if I could
have all this stuff I had just thrown away without actually having to own any of it. The
proliferation of digital texts led me to believe that we won’t be needing dead wood
libraries at all, at least no more than we need vinyl to listen to, or collect music. There
might be geeks, collectors, specialists, who for one reason or another still prefer the
physical form to the digital, but for the rest of us convenience, price, searchability, and
all the other digital goodies give enough reason not to collect stuff that collects dust.
Did you notice how deleting an epub file gives you a different feeling than throwing
out a book? You don’t have to feel guilty, you don’t have to feel anything at all.
So I was reading, reading, reading like never before. But at that time my son was too
young to read, so I didn’t have to think about him, or anyone else besides myself. But
as he was growing, it slowly dawned on me: without these physical books how will I be
able to give him the same chance of serendipity, and of discovery, enchantment, and
immersion that I got in my father’s library? And even later, what will I give him as his
heritage? Son, look into this folder of PDFs: this is my legacy, your heritage, explore,
enjoy, take pride in it?
Collections of anything, whether they are art, books, objects, people, are inseparable
from the person who assembled that collection, and when that person is gone, the
collection dies, as does the most important inroad to it: the will that created this
particular order of things has passed away. But the heavy and unavoidable physicality
of a book collection forces all those left behind to make an effort to approach, to
force their way into, and try to navigate that garden of forking paths that is someone
else’s library. Even if you ultimately get rid of everything, you have to introduce
yourself to every book, and let every book introduce itself to you, so you know what
you’re throwing out. Even if you’ll ultimately kill, you will need to look into the eyes of
all your victims.
With a digital collection that’s, of course, not the case.
I was wrong to think that. I now realize that the future is not fully digital, it is more
a physical-digital hybrid, in which the printed book is not simply an endangered
species protected by a few devoted eccentrics who refuse to embrace the obvious
The e-book is ephemeral. It has little past and even less chance to preserve the
fingerprints of its owners over time. It is impersonal, efficient, fast, abundant, like
18
Own Nothing
Balazs Bodo
19
fast food or plastic, it flows through the hand like sand. It lacks the embodiment, the
materiality which would give it a life in a temporal dimension. If you want to network the
dead and the unborn, as is the ambition of every book, then you need to print and bind,
and create heavy objects that are expensive, inefficient and a burden. This burden
subsiding in the object is the bridge that creates the intergenerational dimension,
that forces you to think of the value of a book.
Own nothing, have nothing. Own everything, and your children will hate you when
you die.
I have to say, I’m struggling to find a new balance here. I started to buy books again,
usually books that I’d already read from a stolen copy on-screen. I know what I want
to buy, I know what is worth preserving. I know what I want to show to my son, what
I want to pass on, what I would like to take care of over time. Before, book buying for
me was an investment into a stranger. Now that thrill is gone forever. I measure up
the merchandise well beforehand, I build an intimate relationship, we make love again
and again, before moving in together.
It is certainly a new kind of relationship with the books I bought since I got my e-reader.
I still have to come to terms with the fact that the books I bought this way are rarely
opened, as I already know them, and their role is not to be read, but to be together.
What do I buy, and what do I get? Temporal, existential security? The chance of
serendipity, if not for me, then for the people around me? The reassuring materiality
of the intimacy I built with these texts through another medium?
All of these and maybe more. But in any case, I sense that this library, the physical
embodiment of a physical-electronic hybrid collection with its unopened books and
overflowing e-reader memory cards, is very different from the library I had, and the
library I’m getting rid of at this very moment. The library that I inherited, the library
that grew organically from the detritus of the everyday, the library that accumulated
books similar to how the books accumulated dust, as is the natural way of things, this
library was full of unknowns, it was a library of potentiality, of opportunities, of trips
waiting to happen. This new, hybrid library is a collection of things that I’m familiar with.
I intimately know every piece, they hold little surprise, they offer few discoveries — at
least for me. The exploration, the discovery, the serendipity, the pre-screening takes
place on the e-reader, among the ephemeral, disposable PDFs and epubs.
We Won
This new hybrid model is based on the cheap availability of digital books. In my case, the
free availability of pirated copies available through shadow libraries. These libraries
don’t have everything on offer, but they have books in an order of magnitude larger
than I’ll ever have the time and chance to read, so they offer enough, enough for me
to fill up hard drives with books I want to read, or at least skim, to try, to taste. As if I
moved into an infinite bookstore or library, where I can be as promiscuous, explorative,
nomadic as I always wanted to be. I can flirt with books, I can have a quickie, or I can
leave them behind without shedding a single tear.
I don’t know how this hybrid library, and this analogue-digital hybrid practice of reading
and collecting would work without the shadow libraries which make everything freely
accessible. I rely on their supply to test texts, and feed and grow my print library.
E-books are cheaper than their print versions, but they still cost money, carry a
risk, a cost of experimentation. Book-streaming, the flat-rate, the all-you-can-eat
format of accessing books is at the moment only available to audiobooks, but rarely
for e-books. I wonder why.
Did you notice that there are no major book piracy lawsuits?
Have everything, and own a few.
20
Balazs Bodo
Own Nothing
21
Of course there is the lawsuit against Sci-Hub and Library Genesis in New York, and
there is another one in Canada against aaaaarg, causing major nuisance to those who
have been named in these cases. But this is almost negligible compared to the high
profile wars the music and audiovisual industries waged against Napster, Grokster,
Kazaa, megaupload and their likes. It is as if book publishers have completely given up on
trying to fight piracy in the courts, and have launched a few lawsuits only to maintain
the appearance that they still care about their digital copyrights. I wonder why.
I know the academic publishing industry slightly better than the mainstream popular
fiction market, and I have the feeling that in the former copyright-based business
models are slowly being replaced by something else. We see no major anti-piracy
efforts from publishers, not because piracy is non-existent — on the contrary, it is
global, and it is big — but because the publishers most probably realized that in the
long run the copyright-based exclusivity model is unsustainable. The copyright wars
of the last two decades taught them that law cannot put an end to piracy. As the
Sci-Hub case demonstrates, you can win all you want in a New York court, but this
has little real-world effect as long as the conditions that attract the users to the
shadow libraries remain.
Exclusivity-based publishing business models are under assault from other sides as
well. Mandated open access in the US and in the EU means that there is a quickly
growing body of new research for the access of which publishers cannot charge
money anymore. LibGen and Sci-Hub make it harder to charge for the back catalogue.
Their sheer existence teaches millions on what uncurtailed open access really is, and
makes it easier for university libraries to negotiate with publishers, as they don’t have
to worry about their patrons being left without any access at all.
The good news is that radical open access may well be happening. It is a less and less
radical idea to have things freely accessible. One has to be less and less radical to
achieve the openness that has been long overdue. Maybe it is not yet obvious today
and the victory is not yet universal, maybe it’ll take some extra years, maybe it won’t
ever be evenly distributed, but it is obvious that this genie, these millions of books on
everything from malaria treatments to critical theory, cannot be erased, and open
access will not be undone, and the future will be free of access barriers.
We Are Not Winning at All
But did we really win? If publishers are happy to let go of access control and copyright,
it means that they’ve found something that is even more profitable than selling
back to us academics the content that we have produced. And this more profitable
something is of course data. Did you notice where all the investment in academic
publishing went in the last decade? Did you notice SSRN, Mendeley, Academia.edu,
ScienceDirect, research platforms, citation software, manuscript repositories, library
systems being bought up by the academic publishing industry? All these platforms
and technologies operate on and support open access content, while they generate
data on the creation, distribution, and use of knowledge; on individuals, researchers,
students, and faculty; on institutions, departments, and programs. They produce data
on the performance, on the success and the failure of the whole domain of research
and education. This is the data that is being privatized, enclosed, packaged, and sold
back to us.
Drip, drip, drop, its only nostalgia. My heart is light, as I don’t have to worry about
gutting the library. Soon it won’t matter at all.
Taylorism reached academia. In the name of efficiency, austerity, and transparency,
our daily activities are measured, profiled, packaged, and sold to the highest bidder.
But in this process of quantification, knowledge on ourselves is lost for us, unless we
pay. We still have some patchy datasets on what we do, on who we are, we still have
this blurred reflection in the data-mirrors that we still do control. But this path of
self-enlightenment is quickly waning as less and less data sources about us are freely
available to us.
22
Own Nothing
Who is downloading books and articles? Everyone. Radical open access? We won,
if you like.
Balazs Bodo
23
I strongly believe that information on the self is the foundation
of self-determination. We need to have data on how we operate,
on what we do in order to know who we are. This is what is being
privatized away from the academic community, this is being
taken away from us.
Radical open access. Not of content, but of the data about
ourselves. This is the next challenge. We will digitize every page,
by hand if we must, that process cannot be stopped anymore.
No outside power can stop it and take that from us. Drip, drip,
drop, this is what I console myself with, as another handful of
books land among the waste.
But the data we lose now will not be so easy to reclaim.
24
Balazs Bodo
Own Nothing
25
What if
We Aren't
the Only
Guerrillas
Out
There?
Laurie
Allen
My goal in this paper is to tell the story
of a grass-roots project called Data
Refuge (http://www.datarefuge.org)
that I helped to co-found shortly after,
and in response to, the Trump election
in the USA. Trump’s reputation as
anti-science, and the promise that his
administration would elevate people into
positions of power with a track record
of distorting, hiding, or obscuring the
scientific evidence of climate change
caused widespread concern that
valuable federal data was now in danger.
The Data Refuge project grew from the
work of Professor Bethany Wiggin and
the graduate students within the Penn
Program in Environmental Humanities
(PPEH), notably Patricia Kim, and was
formed in collaboration with the Penn
Libraries, where I work. In this paper, I
will discuss the Data Refuge project, and
call attention to a few of the challenges
inherent in the effort, especially as
they overlap with the goals of this
collective. I am not a scholar. Instead,
I am a librarian, and my perspective as
a practicing informational professional
informs the way I approach this paper,
which weaves together the practical
and technical work of ‘saving data’ with
the theoretical, systemic, and ethical
issues that frame and inform what we
have done.
I work as the head of a relatively small and new department within the libraries
of the University of Pennsylvania, in the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the
US. I was hired to lead the Digital Scholarship department in the spring of 2016,
and most of the seven (soon to be eight) people within Digital Scholarship joined
the library since then in newly created positions. Our group includes a mapping
and spatial data librarian and three people focused explicitly on supporting the
creation of new Digital Humanities scholarship. There are also two people in the
department who provide services connected with digital scholarly open access
publishing, including the maintenance of the Penn Libraries’ repository of open
access scholarship, and one Data Curation and Management Librarian. This
Data Librarian, Margaret Janz, started working with us in September 2016, and
features heavily into the story I’m about to tell about our work helping to build Data
Refuge. While Margaret and I were the main people in our department involved in
the project, it is useful to understand the work we did as connected more broadly
to the intersection of activities—from multimodal, digital, humanities creation to
open access publishing across disciplines—represented in our department in Penn.
At the start of Data Refuge, Professor Wiggin and her students had already been
exploring the ways that data about the environment can empower communities
through their art, activism, and research, especially along the lower Schuylkill
River in Philadelphia. They were especially attuned to the ways that missing data,
or data that is not collected or communicated, can be a source of disempowerment.
After the Trump election, PPEH graduate students raised the concern that the
political commitments of the new administration would result in the disappearance
of environmental and climate data that is vital to work in cities and communities
around the world. When they raised this concern with the library, together we cofounded Data Refuge. It is notable to point out that, while the Penn Libraries is a
large and relatively well-resourced research library in the United States, it did not
have any automatic way to ingest and steward the data that Professor Wiggin and
her students were concerned about. Our system of acquiring, storing, describing
and sharing publications did not account for, and could not easily handle, the
evident need to take in large quantities of public data from the open web and make
them available and citable by future scholars. Indeed, no large research library
was positioned to respond to this problem in a systematic way, though there was
general agreement that the community would like to help.
The collaborative, grass-roots movement that formed Data Refuge included many
librarians, archivists, and information professionals, but it was clear from the
beginning that my own profession did not have in place a system for stewarding
these vital information resources, or for treating them as ‘publications’ of the
26
Laurie Allen
What if We Aren't the Only Guerrillas Out There?
27
federal government. This fact was widely understood by various members of our
profession, notably by government document librarians, who had been calling
attention to this lack of infrastructure for years. As Government Information
Librarian Shari Laster described in a blog post in November of 2016, government
documents librarians have often felt like they are ‘under siege’ not from political
forces, but from the inattention to government documents afforded by our systems
and infrastructure. Describing the challenges facing the profession in light of the
2016 election, she commented: “Government documents collections in print are
being discarded, while few institutions are putting strategies in place for collecting
government information in digital formats. These strategies are not expanding in
tandem with the explosive proliferation of these sources, and certainly not in pace
with the changing demands for access from public users, researchers, students,
and more.” (Laster 2016) Beyond government documents librarians, our project
joined efforts that were ongoing in a huge range of communities, including: open
data and open science activists; archival experts working on methods of preserving
born-digital content; cultural historians; federal data producers and the archivists
and data scientists they work with; and, of course, scientists.
the scientific record to fight back, in a concrete way, against
an anti-fact establishment. By downloading data and moving
it into the Internet Archive and the Data Refuge repository,
volunteers were actively claiming the importance of accurate
records in maintaining or creating a just society.
This distributed approach to the work of downloading and saving the data
encouraged people to see how they were invested in environmental and scientific
data, and to consider how our government records should be considered the
property of all of us. Attending Data Rescue events was a way for people who value
Of course, access to data need not rely on its inclusion in
a particular repository. As is demonstrated so well in other
contexts, technological methods of sharing files can make
the digital repositories of libraries and archives seem like a
redundant holdover from the past. However, as I will argue
further in this paper, the data that was at risk in Data Refuge
differed in important ways from the contents of what Bodó
refers to as ‘shadow libraries’ (Bodó 2015). For opening
access to copies of journals articles, shadow libraries work
perfectly. However, the value of these shadow libraries relies
on the existence of the widely agreed upon trusted versions.
If in doubt about whether a copy is trustworthy, scholars
can turn to more mainstream copies, if necessary. This was
not the situation we faced building Data Refuge. Instead, we
were often dealing with the sole public, authoritative copy
of a federal dataset and had to assume that, if it were taken
down, there would be no way to check the authenticity of
other copies. The data was not easily pulled out of systems
as the data and the software that contained them were often
inextricably linked. We were dealing with unique, tremendously
valuable, but often difficult-to-untangle datasets rather than
neatly packaged publications. The workflow we established
was designed to privilege authenticity and trustworthiness
over either the speed of the copying or the easy usability of
the resulting data. 2 This extra care around authenticity was
necessary because of the politicized nature of environmental
data that made many people so worried about its removal
after the election. It was important that our project
supported the strongest possible scientific arguments that
could be made with the data we were ‘saving’. That meant
that our copies of the data needed to be citable in scientific
scholarly papers, and that those citations needed to be
able to withstand hostile political forces who claim that the
science of human-caused climate change is ‘uncertain’. It
28
What if We Aren't the Only Guerrillas Out There?
Born from the collaboration between Environmental Humanists and Librarians,
Data Refuge was always an effort both at storytelling and at storing data. During
the first six months of 2017, volunteers across the US (and elsewhere) organized
more than 50 Data Rescue events, with participants numbering in the thousands.
At each event, a group of volunteers used tools created by our collaborators at
the Environmental and Data Governance Initiative (EDGI) (https://envirodatagov.
org/) to support the End of Term Harvest (http://eotarchive.cdlib.org/) project
by identifying seeds from federal websites for web archiving in the Internet
Archive. Simultaneously, more technically advanced volunteers wrote scripts to
pull data out of complex data systems, and packaged that data for longer term
storage in a repository we maintained at datarefuge.org. Still other volunteers
held teach-ins, built profiles of data storytellers, and otherwise engaged in
safeguarding environmental and climate data through community action (see
http://www.ppehlab.org/datarefugepaths). The repository at datarefuge.org that
houses the more difficult data sources has been stewarded by myself and Margaret
Janz through our work at Penn Libraries, but it exists outside the library’s main
technical infrastructure.1
Laurie Allen
29
was easy to imagine in the Autumn of 2016, and even easier
to imagine now, that hostile actors might wish to muddy the
science of climate change by releasing fake data designed
to cast doubt on the science of climate change. For that
reasons, I believe that the unique facts we were seeking
to safeguard in the Data Refuge bear less similarity to the
contents of shadow libraries than they do to news reports
in our current distributed and destabilized mass media
environment. Referring to the ease of publishing ideas on the
open web, Zeynep Tufecki wrote in a recent column, “And
sure, it is a golden age of free speech—if you can believe your
lying eyes. Is that footage you’re watching real? Was it really
filmed where and when it says it was? Is it being shared by altright trolls or a swarm of Russian bots? Was it maybe even
generated with the help of artificial intelligence? (Yes, there
are systems that can create increasingly convincing fake
videos.)” (Tufekci 2018). This was the state we were trying to
avoid when it comes to scientific data, fearing that we might
have the only copy of a given dataset without solid proof that
our copy matched the original.
If US federal websites cease functioning as reliable stewards
of trustworthy scientific data, reproducing their data
without a new model of quality control risks producing the
very censorship that our efforts are supposed to avoid,
and further undermining faith in science. Said another way,
if volunteers duplicated federal data all over the Internet
without a trusted system for ensuring the authenticity of
that data, then as soon as the originals were removed, a sea of
fake copies could easily render the original invisible, and they
would be just as effectively censored. “The most effective
forms of censorship today involve meddling with trust and
attention, not muzzling speech itself.” (Tufekci 2018).
These concerns about the risks of open access to data should
not be understood as capitulation to the current marketdriven approach to scholarly publishing, nor as a call for
continuation of the status quo. Instead, I hope to encourage
continuation of the creative approaches to scholarship
represented in this collective. I also hope the issues raised in
30
Laurie Allen
Data Refuge will serve as a call to take greater responsibility for the systems into
which scholarship flows and the structures of power and assumptions of trust (by
whom, of whom) that scholarship relies on.
While plenty of participants in the Data Refuge community posited scalable
technological approaches to help people trust data, none emerged that were
strong enough to risk further undermining faith in science that a malicious attack
might cause. Instead of focusing on technical solutions that rely on the existing
systems staying roughly as they are, I would like to focus on developing networks
that explore different models of trust in institutions, and that honor the values
of marginalized and indigenous people. For example, in a recent paper, Stacie
Williams and Jarrett Drake describe the detailed decisions they made to establish
and become deserving of trust in supporting the creation of an Archive of Police
Violence in Cleveland (Williams and Drake 2017). The work of Michelle Caswell and
her collaborators on exploring post-custodial archives, and on engaging in radical
empathy in the archives provide great models of the kind of work that I believe is
necessary to establish new models of trust that might help inform new modes of
sharing and relying on community information (Caswell and Cifor 2016).
Beyond seeking new ways to build trust, it has become clear that new methods
are needed to help filter and contextualize publications. Our current reliance
on a few for-profit companies to filter and rank what we see of the information
landscape has proved to be tremendously harmful for the dissemination of facts,
and has been especially dangerous to marginalized communities (Noble 2018).
While the world of scholarly humanities publishing is doing somewhat better than
open data or mass media, there is still a risk that without new forms of filtering and
establishing quality and trustworthiness, good ideas and important scholarship will
be lost in the rankings of search engines and the algorithms of social media. We
need new, large scale systems to help people filter and rank the information on the
open web. In our current situation, according to media theorist dana boyd, “[t]he
onus is on the public to interpret what they see. To self-investigate. Since we live
in a neoliberal society that prioritizes individual agency, we double down on media
literacy as the ‘solution’ to misinformation. It’s up to each of us as individuals to
decide for ourselves whether or not what we’re getting is true.” (boyd 2018)
In closing, I’ll return to the notion of Guerrilla warfare that brought this panel
together. While some of our collaborators and some in the press did use the term
‘Guerrilla archiving’ to describe the data rescue efforts (Currie and Paris 2017),
I generally did not. The work we did was indeed designed to take advantage of
tactics that allow a small number of actors to resist giant state power. However,
What if We Aren't the Only Guerrillas Out There?
31
if anything, the most direct target of these guerrilla actions in my mind was not
the Trump administration. Instead, the action was designed to prompt responses
by the institutions where many of us work and by communities of scholars and
activists who make up these institutions. It was designed to get as many people as
possible working to address the complex issues raised by the two interconnected
challenges that the Data Refuge project threw into relief. The first challenge,
of course, is the need for new scientific, artistic, scholarly and narrative ways of
contending with the reality of global, human-made climate change. And the second
challenge, as I’ve argued in this paper, is that our systems of establishing and
signaling trustworthiness, quality, reliability and stability of information are in dire
need of creative intervention as well. It is not just publishing but all of our systems
for discovering, sharing, acquiring, describing and storing that scholarship that
need support, maintenance, repair, and perhaps in some cases, replacement. And
this work will rely on scholars, as well as expert information practitioners from a
range of fields (Caswell 2016).
¹ At the time of this writing, we are working
on un-packing and repackaging the data
within Data Refuge for eventual inclusion
in various Research Library Repositories.
Ideally, of course, all federally produced
datasets would be published in neatly
packaged and more easily preservable
containers, along with enough technical
checks to ensure their validity (hashes,
checksums, etc.) and each agency would
create a periodical published inventory of
datasets. But the situation we encountered
with Data Refuge did not start us in
anything like that situation, despite the
hugely successful and important work of
the employees who created and maintained
data.gov. For a fuller view of this workflow,
see my talk at CSVConf 2017 (Allen 2017).
2
Closing note: The workflow established and used at Data Rescue events was
designed to tackle this set of difficult issues, but needed refinement, and was retired
in mid-2017. The Data Refuge project continues, led by Professor Wiggin and her
colleagues and students at PPEH, who are “building a storybank to document
how data lives in the world – and how it connects people, places, and non-human
species.” (“DataRefuge” n.d.) In addition, the set of issues raised by Data Refuge
continue to inform my work and the work of many of our collaborators.
32
Laurie Allen
What if We Aren't the Only Guerrillas Out There?
33
References
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