digitization in Mars & Medak 2017
oject Lead of the Creative Commons Croatia (Creative
Commons, 2016). He works as coordinator of theory and publishing activities at
the Multimedia Institute/MaMa (Zagreb, Croatia) (Net.culture club MaMa, 2016a).
Tomislav is an active contributor to the Croatian Right to the City movement
(Pravo na grad, 2016). He interpreted to numerous books into Croatian language,
including Multitude (Hardt & Negri, 2009) and A Hacker Manifesto (Wark,
2006c). He is an author and performer with the internationally acclaimed Zagrebbased performance collective BADco (BADco, 2016). Tomislav writes and talks
about politics of technological development, and politics and aesthetics.
Tomislav and Marcell have been working together for almost two decades.
Their recent collaborations include a number of activities around the Public Library
project, including HAIP festival (Ljubljana, 2012), exhibitions in
Württembergischer Kunstverein (Stuttgart, 2014) and Galerija Nova (Zagreb,
2015), as well as coordinated digitization projects Written-off (2015), Digital
Archive of Praxis and the Korčula Summer School (2016), and Catalogue of
Liberated Books (2013) (in Monoskop, 2016b).
243
CHAPTER 12
Ana Kuzmanic is an artist based in Zagreb and Associate Professor at the
Faculty of Civil Engineering, Architecture and Geodesy at the University in Split
(Croatia), lecturing in drawing, design and architectural presentation. She is a
member of the Croatian Association of Visual Artists. Since 2007 she held more
than a dozen individual exhibitions and took part in numerous collective
exhibitions in Croatia, the UK, Italy, Egypt, the Netherlands, the USA, Lithuania
and Slovenia. In 2011 she co-founded the international artist collective Eastern
Surf, which has “organised, produced and participated in a number of projects
including exhibitions, performance, video, sculpture, publications and web based
work” (Eastern Surf, 2017). Ana's artwork critically deconstructs dominant social
readings of reality. It tests
se of a modern society. Only educated and informed citizens are able to
claim their rights and fully participate in the polity for common good. Yet, as
digital networks have radically expanded availability of literature and science,
provision of de-commodified access to digital objects has been by and large denied
to public libraries. For instance, libraries frequently do not have the right to
purchase e-books for lending and preservations. If they do, they are limited in
regards to how many times and under what conditions they can lend digital objects
before the license and the object itself is revoked (Greenfield, 2012). The case of
academic journals is even worse. As journals become increasingly digital, libraries
can provide access and ‘preserve’ them only for as long as they pay extortionate
subscriptions. The Public Library project fills in the space that remains denied to
real-world public libraries by building tools for organizing and sharing electronic
libraries, creating digitization workflows and making books available online.
Obviously, we are not alone in this effort. There are many other platforms, public
and hidden, that help people to share books. And the practice of sharing is massive.
PJ & AK: The Public Library project (Memory of the World, 2016a) is a part of
a wider global movement based, amongst other influences, on the seminal work of
Aaron Swartz. This movement consists of various projects including but not
limited to Library Genesis, Aaaaarg.org, UbuWeb, and others. Please situate The
Public Library project in the wider context of this movement. What are its distinct
features? What are its main contributions to the movement at large?
MM & TM: The Public Library project is informed by two historic moments in
the development of institution of public library The first defining moment
happened during the French Revolution – the seizure of library collections from
aristocracy and clergy, and their transfer to the Bibliothèque Nationale and
municipal li
digitization in Mars, Medak & Sekulic 2016
fitable deal than a risky investment in
a market in crisis.
233
The information revolution stepped out
onto the historical stage with the promise
of radical democratisation of communication, culture and politics. Anyone could
become the media and address the global
public, emancipate from the constrictive
space of identity, and obtain access to entire
knowledge of the world. However, instead
of resulting in democratising and emancipatory processes, with the handing over of
Internet and technological innovation to the
market in 1990s it resulted in the gradual
disruption of previous social arrangements
in the allocation of goods and in the intensification of the commodification process.
That trajectory reached its full-blown development in the form of Internet platforms
that simultaneously enabled old owners of
goods to control more closely their accessibility and permited new owners to seek out
new forms of commercial exploitation. Take
for example Google Books, where the process of digitization of the entire printed culture of the world resulted in no more than
ad and retail space where only few books
can be accessed for free. Or Amazon Kinde,
where the owner of the platform has such
dramatic control over books that on behest
of copyright holders it can remotely delete
a purchased copy of a book, as quite indicatively happened in 2009 with Orwell's 1984.
The promised technological innovation that
would bring a new turn of the complexity in
the social allocation of goods resulted in a
simplification and reduction of everything
into private property.
The history of resistance to such extreme forms of enclosure of culture and
knowledge is only a bit younger than the
234
Taken literally
processes of commodification themselves
that had begun with the rise of trade in
books. As early as the French Revolution,
the confiscation of books from the libraries
of clergy and aristocracy and their transfer
into national and provincial libraries signalled that the right of access to knowle
Display 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 ALL characters around the word.