digitization in Dockray, Forster & Public Office 2018
ne or included in other NodeJS projects.
## Accidents of the Archive
The 1996 UNESCO publication [Lost Memory: Libraries and Archives Destroyed in
the Twentieth Century](http://www.stephenmclaughlin.net/ph-
library/texts/UNESCO%201996%20-%20Lost%20Memory_%20Libraries%20and%20Archives%20Destroyed%20in%20the%20Twentieth%20Century.pdf)
makes the fragility of historical repositories startlingly clear. “[A]cidified
paper that crumbles to dust, leather, parchment, film and magnetic light
attacked by light, heat humidity or dust” all assault archives. “Floods,
fires, hurricanes, storms, earthquakes” and, of course, “acts of war,
bombardment and fire, whether deliberate or accidental” wiped out significant
portions of many hundreds of major research libraries worldwide. When
expanding the scope to consider public, private, and community libraries, that
number becomes uncountable.
Published during the early days of the World Wide Web, the report acknowledges
the emerging role of digitization (“online databases, CD-ROM etc.”), but today
we might reflect on the last twenty years, which has also introduced new forms
of loss.
Digital archives and libraries are subject to a number of potential hazards:
technical accidents like disk failures, accidental deletions, misplaced data
and imperfect data migrations, as well as political-economic accidents like
defunding of the hosting institution, deaccessioning parts of the collection
and sudden restrictions of access rights. Immediately after library.nu was
shut down on the grounds of copyright infringement in 2012, [Lawrence Liang
wrote](https://kafila.online/2012/02/19/library-nu-r-i-p/) of feeling “first
and foremost a visceral experience of loss.”
Whatever its legal status, the abrupt absence of a collection of 400,000 books
appears to follow a particularly contemporary pattern. In 2008, Aaron Swartz
moved millions of US federal court documents out from behind a paywall,
resulting in a trial and an FBI investigation. Th
digitization in Constant 2015
uty.
One of the techniques OSP uses to get people involved with the process and the
technologies is the ‘Print Party’, can you say what that is?
‘Print Parties’ are irregular public performances we organise when we feel
the need to report on what we discovered and where we’ve been; as antiheroes of our own adventures we open up our practice in a way that seems
infectious. We make a point of presenting a new experiment, of producing
something printed and also something edible on site each time; this mix of
ingredients seems to work best. ‘Print Parties’ are how we keep contact with
our fellow designers who are interested in our journey but have sometimes
difficulty following us into the exotic territory of BoF, Version Control and
GPL3.
You state in a few texts that OSP is interested in glitches as a productive force in
software, how do you explain this to a printer trying to get a file to convert to the
kind of thing they expect?
Not! Printing has become cheap through digitization and is streamlined to
the extreme. Often there is literally no space built in to even have a second
look at a differently formatted file, so to state that glitches are productive
is easier said than done. Still, those hickups make processes tangible, especially at moments you don’t want them to interfere.
For a book we are designing at the moment, we might partially work by
hand on positive film (a step now also skipped in file-to-plate systems). It
makes us literally sit with pre-press professionals for a day and hopefully we
can learn better where to intervene and how to involve them into the process.
To take the productive force of glitches beyond predictable aesthetics, means
9
it really made me laugh to think of Joseph Müller Brockman as vitalist
305
most of all a shift of rhythm – to effect other levels than the production
process itself. We gradually learn how our ideas about slow cooking design
can survive the instant need to meet deadlines. The terminology is a bit
p
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