‘When everyone is a librarian, the library is everywhere’^[1]

‘The emancipatory revolutions that we humans are most proud of are those empower the oppressed and give them the means to reach their dreams. That the dream of Public Library in the age of internet (the dream of universal access to all human knowledge), should now be relinquished, that cannot be allowed to happen. And artists and hackers, as in many other instances, are taking it upon themselves to make these dreams a reality.’^[2]

---

Shubigi Rao: Thank you for meeting me, Tomi. As you know I had a long conversation with Marcell (Mars) earlier this week, but I’d like to ask you more about the work you both do, especially under the Public Library project. I had read this earlier (reads aloud) ‘Public Library is the synergy of two efforts. First, it makes the case for the institution of the public library and its principle of universal access to knowledge. Second, it is an exploration and development of distributed internet infrastructure for amateur librarians.’^[3] This is a very clear and declarative outlining of its aims, and a bringing together of two spheres of knowledge-ownership and dissemination into a single position, and I’m interested in how this came about.

Tomislav Medak: Public Library emerged in 2012 as a reaction to the shuttering of Library.nu, another shadow library shut down by the publishing industry. Marcell primarily started thinking how could a platform be designed for people to share books and articles in a peer-to-peer infrastructure. He started looking at viable strategizing, and out of that he created a plug-in for Calibre, a book-managing software, called Let’s Share Books.

This was the starting point for a more general reflection on the status of the public library as a social institution in charge of providing access to knowledge to all members of society. We felt that this is an important question for two reasons. There are two aspects to the crisis of public libraries in the present. The first is with the digital shift, with public libraries as the central places for dissemination of knowledge has been in a way constrained. This is because while digital technologies have provided immense capacity for access, the digitization of books was very slow, and the publishers didn’t want to provide public libraries with digital licences for lending their ebooks freely. That has meant users have themselves resorted to creating libraries to realize the possibilities offered by digital technology, possibilities that public libraries were prevented from using due to copyright and intellectual property. That is one aspect of the crisis. The other is being 2012, the austerity policies implemented across Europe and elsewhere that have resulted in financial cuts to libraries. They had to scale down activities, sometimes even being shut down completely.

Reflecting these two aspects of the crisis of the institution, we have posited that shadow libraries in a way have complemented the function of public libraries, providing access to knowledge that physical public libraries were prevented from doing. In a way, we wanted to open up public debate (outside the grey area) and study the affirming practices of sharing digital books, articles, archives, and the creation and maintenance of repositories and electronic libraries that were already doing that. Also, our own infrastructure that we were creating at the time, and that we still maintain, was a sort of test case scenario. So, we have reduced the understanding of public library to a minimal definition, which includes a collection of books available to all in society without economic or social barriers, to a catalogue, and to a librarian. With these elements, we have tried to create infrastructure where everyone who has digital books on their computer, and most of us do, to be able to serve as a public library. In a way, to sort the digital files they have, to organize metadata that form a catalogue, and to serve as a place of access for readers, potential users to consult them on the books stored on their computers. On the software side, that’s what Calibre and Let’s Share Books plugin do.

Another aspect of our work has to do with articulating a certain political position on the uneven and combined world of access to knowledge. Look at knowledge economy in general, and the world rankings of universities for instance, and you can see that of the top five hundred universities, only fifty are outside four to six so-called ‘first world countries. In our corner of the world (the Balkans) there are none, even in the top 800. It is clear that unevenness in knowledge economies follows unevenness in economic global relations – it’s not a sophisticated insight, but the economy around books and journals follow the same pattern. It's a market monopoly dominated by four or five large publishers that are headquartered in those four or six countries that hold the top universities. And yet access to knowledge, science, literature is what in many ways defines the ability of a society to keep up with advances in various disciplines and to hold on to some potential to develop with some equity in a world with global divisions of labour.

Unlike some other shadow libraries, we (at the Public Library project) have been trying to espouse the position that is not trying to keep this in the shadows, in the grey zone, that is claiming that this is not necessarily illegal. I guess, from the globalized harmonized economic framework, this is illegal what we do, but we think it is political and legitimate. And in a way, to stand for that position, there is a political methodology, civil disobedience. We are advocating a form of civil disobedience by claiming publicly what we do, thus opening up to a debate what is considered illegal – that should be considered politically legitimate. We are trying to address this political legitimacy through a vision, a fantasy where the access to knowledge must be universal. At least democratic ideology has it that full participation of citizenry in a body politic is only made possible if everybody is an informed, enlightened citizen. This universal is only made possible by taking that universalism for fact, in spite of the limitations of copyright.

So this is the position that we are trying to articulate – first, the universalism of access to knowledge in the form of the public library. And the other one, in the figure of custodianship. We think that many of the shadow libraries exist and persist because there are courageous individuals, many of them, who take to digitizing books, putting them online, keeping the servers going, moving them when they come under pressure. It’s caring for a certain knowledge commons, as opposed to commodified knowledge. And this is a form of custodianship that extends through the whole gamut of the knowledge factory, so to say, from those who produce, and write, and share their writing, all the way to those who only download or upload. It's a whole spectrum of various types of activities that create that community of custodianship.

We think that practices that provide access, and are using digitally available sources of knowledge, and that are political because they react to that unevenness, reflect the function of public libraries. We have articulated our positions in a letter that we wrote collectively, with a number of amateur librarians who maintain various libraries, repositories, archives – some of them paper, some digital. We have written a public letter in response to Elsevier’s suit against Sci-Hub and Library Genesis. We wrote in solidarity with the libraries, and received a lot of support in turn by people around the world. Some have provided translations of the letter, or improvised spontaneous forms of it. A lot of response came also from the open access community and its supporters, as well as from those who critique the knowledge economy in general. This is the second part of our work.

The third part is more specific, it has to do with digitizing books and journals. We have been doing that first through creating (along with an engineer from Belgrade) DIY book-scanners – we built some eight or nine by now. We have provided these scanners, or have been commissioned by various communities to make them, and the scanners are now in different places and communities around the world. We have also been trying to provide workflows to those communities on how to use them.

We are continuously digitizing books ourselves with our local community here, whether it is people from the School of Art and Humanities in Zagreb, or on the left. Scanning mostly books with no digital copy, or were not even physically available because they were exorcised, excised from Croatian libraries in the 1990s. These were often books on Marxist literature, labour studies, and Serbian and Cyrillic literature. Through these activities, we are trying to look at how libraries are engines of epistemic classification, and also epistemic and ideological regulation of knowledge.

We did a project called Written Off, where we asked people to bring books they had that we knew were exorcised from Croatian libraries – a process that was only partially documented – we only know a small fraction of what was removed. Over a couple of years, almost three million volumes were written off from Croatian libraries, several times more than is allowed under standard writing off of disused or old or unused books in libraries.

It’s obvious that in the 90s the public libraries in Croatia, as public libraries often do, were complicit and part of national identity formation process – which was a form of symbolic violence – repression of the past and previous systems with the new regime change. This was an element of violence in a landscape of violent acts that were meant to purify or solidify Croatian identity as opposed to Serbian or Bosnian Muslim identity, with whom we share language, with whom we share history, with whom we are only religiously fragmented, because of being under historically different empires.

There was, in a way, an extension of allowed spontaneous violence that took both its symbolic form, such as in the destruction of monuments and writing off books, but also in physical form, as war and war crime. There was also the repression of Serbian population in the context of internecine war that was happening in Yugoslavia in the 90s. So, the third aspect of our work is awareness of these forms of violence, and responses to their continuation.

SR: My friend Marko told me when he was a child in the 90s, he was wandering through the city library and found a previously locked room that had been left open. It was packed to the ceiling with books. This room was always locked, no public access. There was no obvious act of destruction here. All the library did was leave them locked up, and not soon after, when they moved to another building, they simply left those ‘undesirable’ books behind, which were then carted out with waste building material as the next occupants renovated it. Later, the library did away with index cards when they updated to a digital catalogue, and it was even easier then – they just didn’t transfer the catalogue information (on the purged books) from the cards to the online catalogue. And that's how those books disappeared, with no official record remaining of them ever having existed in the library. They only exist in the memories of those who used those books.

TM: There must be many such stories, not just here, but in other countries and regimes too.

SR: Yes, we perhaps only know a fraction of the loss. Tomi, it has been insightful and illuminating, I appreciate your time and thoroughness in explaining the Public Library project, and the work you all do. Thank you.