We propose a radical re-engagement between users and libraries and archives – which record & preserve our past and present worlds – which will enable us to move more knowledgeably towards our shared future, a future in which the library and archive should, and must, play a central lifelong role.
The library and archive acts as a prime intermediary in effective knowledge exchange between discoverers and users. Placing libraries and archives within the framework of the digital allows us to explore new models of access and enables a widening of participation. It also develops new directions in our provision of lifelong learning and civic engagement: all core principles of library and archive services.
By properly addressing technological and digital developments, and by placing the user at the centre of our services, we believe that the public library can provide us with some real, working, and sustainable models for our future shared growth.
In light of current global uncertainty, community distrust, and commercialisation of the public sphere, we resolutely believe that we would all do well to preserve, and indeed enhance these public services, to the best of our individual and collective abilities – before it is too late.
When Google owns the index to Google Print; when copyright and distribution models explode in the virtual world; when the ‘book’ shifts from ‘tangible’ physical object to ‘intangible’ digital ‘content’; when social networks/bookmarks and non-hierarchical classification structures (folksonomies) engage users the most:
where is the library in all of this?As
the most impartial, non-commercial, equitable, and non-partisan knowledge-acquisition space it should be the first point of call,
the access point, for an information seeker.
So, in the meantime, while the real world is playing catch up, we’re here to:
- Remind people of the importance of free public libraries
- Subvert mainstream channels of distribution
- Remind people that access to knowledge should be free and not dependent upon economic wealth hierarchies
- Show people that poetry/art can provide answers to questions we ask of life
- Experiment in existing outside of 'the market' – thereby, instead, investing in social capital, social innovation and community.
Because, as the poet Louise Glück also writes:
“contact, of the most intimate sort, is what poetry can accomplish. Poems do not endure as objects but as presences. When you read anything worth remembering, you liberate a human voice; you release into the world again a companion spirit.”See. We really are all in this together.
So, with this in mind, we aim to make life taste better.
Word.
Please come and help us in our work.