Title image of bookshelf. Words 'WHAT CAN a library DO?' appear between books.

[A/N: This is an abstract for a longer paper I am completing for Elaine Gan's Feminist Technoscience class, a course I auditing to support my work on this thesis. The full-version will be available at this site after June 1st.]

Libraries, in their most robust realization, are capable of not only housing the imaginaries of many worlds, but also of bringing those imaginaries into being. In this notion of the library, we can understand its systems of classification, cataloging, and shelving as both giving shape to the reality of the world, and inevitably, structuring the knowledge projects made possible by its scaffoldings.

In the space of this research, I hope to examine the practices of a few librarians, curators, and cataloguers to examine the ways in which libraries have been imagined and reimagined themselves. Each of the examples considered here offer novel or expanded visions of what a library can be. The differences in their conceptions offer their visitors varied footings for their journeys. If we were to imagine the possibility space as a terrain, some libraries have built out high-speed light rail into their structures, while others require you to enlist the wisdom of local guides. It seems impossible to conclude that one methodology surpasses all others, but rather, they afford different modes of travel, each with its own charms.

Laura E. Helton. "On Decimals, Catalogs, and Racial Imaginaries of Reading."
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Dorothy Porter.

It is no secret that the two most prominent classification systems used in libraries–the Library of Congress Classification and the Dewey Decimal System–are based on the perspective of wealthy, Anglo-Saxon men (one specific man, in the case of the latter). The difficulties of scholarship under these organizations of knowledge are most evident to communities that are distant from that perspective. It is with this understanding that we may properly contextualize the work of Dorothy Porter, who curated Howard University’s Moorland Foundation collection. The act of assembling such a collection was a feat in itself, and in order to make visible the contributions of and subject matter relevant to the lives of Black Americans, Porter began to devise classification systems of her own. To imagine new classifications, she had to consider the questions: “What might people ask of these materials, and how might the collection reply?” (Helton 101).

In her task of collecting materials, she began to realize how categorizations had the potential to hide texts, or create what she termed “fugitive materials” – for example, Harvard University’s records on slavery appeared not in its general catalog, in rather, in the catalogs of its business library. The practices of Porter’s librarianship, in response to these circumstances, emphasized the epistemological over material ownership – rather than a physical collection, she imagined “a portal of texts that would never reside materially in one place” (Helton 108). To respond to the research inquiries that arrived at the Moorland Foundation, Porter produced thousands of small bibliographies. By creating such subject matter catalogs, Porter began to shape “the contours of what could and could not be known” (Helton 110).

Anna-Sophie Springer & Etienne Turpin. Fantasies of the Library.
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Aby Warburg.

Another librarian of note is Aby Warburg, whose collection exists as the Warburg Institute at the University of London. Warburg posited a guiding principle of libraries known as “the law of the good neighborhood.” Like Porter, Warburg was wary of the systems that organized one kind of knowledge far away from another. He believed “that the knowledge of every relevant discipline needed to be mobilized together while being accessible in one space where the researcher could ‘wander from shelf to shelf’” (Springer 43).

In contrast to Porter, for Warburg physical proximity was the method by which he brought texts in conversation with each other. Rather than an explicit recasting of a classification system, he blew through classification systems altogether. Even the suggested connections posed by adjacency was temporary, as he continually rearranged and reshelved his collection.

For Warburg, this curatorial act was a physicalization of his internal arrangement of the world. His treatment of his collection posited a possible directive for future artists in archives: “The curatorial agent of the library inhabits the interstice between librarian and reader, working on improbable exchanges that might excite, provoke, seduce, or otherwise perturb the paginated mind”(Springer 7).

Of course, librarians have not been alone in imagining new interfaces to the world’s knowledge. The kind of dynamism imagined by Warburg is mechanisized and digitized by the imaginings of Cedric Price, futurist and architect. Price conceived of a “Generator” project in which users of a building would have the ability to reconfigure the architecture based on their needs. Using the user input from a set of questionnaires of games, the Generator created different configurations to accommodate different creative impulses of the user. Though the scope of the Generator project is not research centric, the task it takes on is not dissimilar to that of a librarian or library, which seeks to leverage its vast epistemological structures to unite the reader with their desired text. The Generator creates new literal spaces and pathways to bring about new social realities in its space, but the task of the librarian is not dissimilar in helping readers forge similar engagements across collections.

In “Eros in the Library,” a paper presented at the 2018 annual conference for the Art Libraries Society, Melissa Adler recalls the ancient (and usually uncelebrated) cataloguer Pamphila, who organized texts based not on chronology, but rather, in “weavings” what would be pleasing to the reader. Adler notes that the privileging of such aesthetics in the act of cataloging stands in contrast to current practices:

“In today’s libraries, critical classification research has demonstrated the ways that the reduction of materials to singular subject categories not only impedes access to the varied and complex kinds of subjects and media that artists work with, but also carries hetero-patriarchal assumptions into the practices of doing librarianship, the arts, and research” (Adler 69).

Melissa Adler. Eros in the Library: Considering the aesthetics of knowledge organization.
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It is the library’s physical and informational architectures construct access to our public memory, model old and new modes of citizenship, and make new futures possible – or for Adler, “the shape of a library affects access and discovery.”

But, like Pamphila, she proposes an alternative vision:

“Might weaving or embroidering the library space – not metaphorically, not in the craft room, and not in online networks, but in and along and across the stacks, with threads of many colors, with books, and with other people – afford different erotic encounters in the library?” (Adler 70).

In the remainder of this research endeavor, I hope to examine new interfaces for engaging with existing collections. I hope that through the creation of a number of speculative interfaces to imagine what those interfaces make possible. What kinds of encounters do they enable, and what is the value of those encounters? What are the possible relationships that visitors to a collection have with its structure? Can new interfaces give new life to what is forgotten or left out of scholar engagement?

There is an element of worldmaking suggested by the work of the librarians and cataloguers examined here, but I suspect that worldmaking is not inevitable from physical and epistemological rearrangements. The question that remains is when are architectural and informational reconfigurations meaningful? How can the librarian and the reader conspire to make new worlds possible?