Constant

Unbound Libraries documentation

Elodie — 2021-06-25T12:33:22Z

The documentation of Unbound Libraries is there!

Unbound Libraries was a worksession that happened in June 2020. It was the first worksession of Constant entirely online as covid had made its entry into our realities. For this documentation, we decided to invite 4 participants of the worksession to contribute in their own ways.

The collective BAL (Brussels Almanack Lesbian) share what has been significant for their archiving practice during the worksession. They also assembled a list of their own modes of doing list in the form of a fortune teller along with pieces from their archive of ephemera from lesbian radical spaces.

Clara Balaguer shows her practice of radical note-taking as a strategy to show the ways into which conversations are an essential part of her work and to make visible the different voices that form and influence her writing and thinking.

Eva Weinmayr gives a compelling collection of reflections from the worksession (and beyond) organised into 8 chapters: Sameness and Difference, Structural hierarchies, Claim to truth, Uninscriptions, The Caged Antelope, Confusion, Prejudices and Antipathies: descriptors are never neutral, Teaching the Radical Catalogue.

Infrastructural Manoeuvres writes a text on the questions raised by the collective during the worksession in relation to the formats used by libraries around the world for their cataloguing methodology. I.M. writes their text according to the format MARC 21 for bibliographic data. Marc is the acronym for Machine-Readable Cataloguing.

Library encounters of the third kind: BBBr̶u̶s̶s̶e̶l̶s̶ Edition

dickreckard — 2020-12-07T02:15:11Z

This event is dedicated to different projects that reflect on the practices of digital catalogs, classification systems and other forms of systematic organization of knowledge. It will make a moment, in the form of an informal conversation, to consider together the less visible but fundamental aspects of libraries and librarian practice.

The event will be held online on Constant's BigBlueButton instance, to join please send an email to bibliotheek@rietveldacademie.nl.

The Rietveld and Sandberg Library is throughout the year the site of experiments and reflections on the social and technical aspects of libraries, catalogs and classification systems, with a special emphasis on the particularity of its own context within an educational institution for the arts.
Different collaborations and projects investigating the less visible but fundamental aspects of libraries and librarian practice have departed from or found their way into the library; others haven't yet found an occasion to cross paths.

As the current conditions prevent these much needed exchanges, Infrastructural Manoeuvres organizes an online encounter, both to create a moment of discussion with interlocutors that share some of the questions and interests, and to make a public relay of the ongoing work and conversations taking place in and around the library.

With reverberations (textual, aural, past and present) by: I.M.*, Lizzy van Italie**, Eva Weinmayr, Will Holder, Lieven Lahaye, Sarah Magnan, Monday readers, Unbound Libraries participants.

* The Infrastructural Manoeuvres project has been creating space for conversations on software, hardware and peopleware choices, in the form of meetings and workshops, which have directly informed the ongoing work on the library's catalog system, its infrastructure and its website in-the-making (read more about the project at https://catalogue.rietveldacademie.nl/about.html) .

** Lizzy van Italie has been researching the physicalities of libraries, bookshelves and classification standards through metaphors of orientation and navigation, placing into dialog her artistic practice with her experience as library clerk and as sailor.

This event is supported by the cultural activities grant from the Flemish Community
Image: Lizzy van Italie

Unbound Libraries Broadcast

An — 2020-05-26T17:03:59Z

On Friday 5th of June, the worksession Unbound Libraries will come to an end.
After a week of intensive research 'at-home', the participants will gather online at 3pm for an informal sharing moment. They will share, discuss and show impressions of their research during the week.
Worksessions of Constant don't have any production constraint. This moment is an opportunity for friendly outsiders to get some glimpse of the explorations that took place over the week.

The session will take place here: https://bbb.constantvzw.org/b/mar-ztm-epn

Unbound Libraries Worksession

Elodie — 2020-04-24T12:15:38Z

“Tools cannot be separated from the knowledge systems in which they have been imagined and made”
Frozen Social Relations and Time for a Thaw: Visibility, Exclusions, and Considerations for Postcolonial Digital Archives by Martha Nell Smith, 2014

Unbound Libraries is a worksession that questions and experiments with libraries as knowledge systems. We look at libraries with physical and digital presences alongside their distinct elements (materials, categorisation systems, protocols, human labor, locality, missions, means...) variously configuring the libraries' form(s), implications and significance.

We understand libraries in their multiplicity and potentialities; from an authoritative position interwove with colonial and patriarchal legacies to community-based processes rooted in local urgencies, libraries have many facets. Also, importance is given to digital infrastructures and tools which have the potential to question-by-doing the dominant practices, by widening the library's terms of accessibility and agency.

This worksession is organised in collaboration with Muntpunt (Brussels), BNA-BBOT (Brussels), BAL (Brussels), OSP (Brussels), Infrastructural Manoeuvres (Amsterdam), Hackers & Designers (Amsterdam), Mayday Rooms(London), The People Speak (London).
With a big thank you to KBR (Brussels).

Worksessions

Constant organises a worksession every six months. They function as temporary research labs, collective working environments where different types of expertise come into contact with each other. Worksessions are intensive otherwise-disciplined situations to which artists, software developers, theorists, activists and others contribute. During worksessions we develop ideas and prototypes that in the long-term lead to publications, projects and new proposals. As worksessions are multi-modal, this particular worksession will be shaped in response to our current global situation into which closeness, exchange and togetherness are drastically altered.

Practical

As the exceptional circumstances resulted in a significant change of format, no call has been opened for this worksession, unfortunately. Unbound Libraries will attempt to support collective research with different configurations of exchange and temporality. Participants will not be together physically, and will be using different online tools to keep in touch. Participants will join this worksession through an invitation to 5 days of intensified research and exchange from June 1st till June 5th. The research period is meant to be phased by individual or group research and online exchanges between participants.

We prefer to work with Free Software and distribute work under Open Content Licenses. While we favour Free and Open source philosophy, we're also conscious of the links of Open Access ideology to colonial extractivism. We see this worksession as an occasion to experiment with ways of sharing that go beyond the open/closed binary. This model can obstruct the imagination for complexity and porosity. In addition we want to take into account the rights to opacity in access and transmission of knowledge, especially in regard to marginalized communities.

Unbound Libraries

An — 2020-04-09T18:00:43Z

Unbound Libraries was a worksession around digital libraries and tools for organisation of knowledge that took place online from 31 May to 5 June 2020.

“Tools cannot be separated from the knowledge systems in which they have been imagined and made,” (Frozen Social Relations and Time for a Thaw: Visibility, Exclusions, and Considerations for Postcolonial Digital Archives by Martha Nell Smith, 2014)

The public library can be considered as an archetypal form of knowledge system, that aims to collect, represent and preserve general knowledge. This means to centralise knowledge, too, and for institutional libraries this implies that librarians are tasked to define, collect and categorize knowledge deemed meaningful in accordance to the institution's set of values and missions. In a library, generally structured by a hierarchical model, there can be various degrees of porosity between its levels of authority.

The librarian's task of organizing knowledge happens in dialogue with other parties, too, such as the Library of Congress, whose category system is used by many libraries and who is responsible for the ubiquitous MARC record format. Within these complex interrelations, knowledge curation practices have historically over-represented certain narratives, as catalogue systems are deeply ingrained in the western tradition, with its colonial and patriarchal legacies. That is why many knowledge transmission methods occurring throughout a multiplicity of social, geographical and cultural contexts have been neglected or overlooked. Libraries are mainly organised around the book, which persists as the canonical knowledge unit, while oral histories, non-book objects, wall posters, flyers, self-published books and zines are less present.

The multiplication of informal libraries and archives often linked to specific communities as well as the appearance of digital libraries - legal and illegal - question the boundaries of the public library as an institutional knowledge system and show the richness of its outsides. These alternatives are meaningful for multiple reasons: for their content, collected in socially and politically situated environments; for their structures, as they propose a wider and wilder variety of modes, criterias, categories, protocols; and their presence, which tells of necessities that cannot be met by public libraries. Community-based collections, radical archives, decentralized digital libraries have for decades been working in their own ways alongside and against their institutional counterparts as forms of radical and critical librarianship.

Digital infrastructures and tools can support these practices as they have the potential to question-by-doing the dominant practices, by widening the library's terms of accessibility and agency. What happens if we start creating parallels between standard tools for library collections and more informal, feminist or oral tools ? What strategies can we invent to act upon omissions, essentialisms, generalisations and stereotypes in categorisation systems? Can we think a federation of libraries on the basis of other criteria than uniformity and sameness? How can we open up collections to the multiple forms of knowledge transfer related to orality, situated objects, physical embodiment, self-published objects, videos...? What can we learn from the promise of digital formats to go beyond pages, page numbers and index systems that are bound to the single book only?

Worksessions

Practical

As worksessions are multi-modal, this particular worksession will be shaped in response to our current global situation into which closeness, exchange and togetherness are drastically altered. Unbound Libraries will attempt to support collective research with different configurations of exchange and temporality. Participants will not be together physically, and will be using different online tools to keep in touch. Participants will join this worksession through an invitation to 5 days of intensified research and exchange from June 1st till June 5th. The research period is meant to be phased by individual or group research and online exchanges between participants. Auto-documentation and generous exchange of ideas and knowledge is key.