Infrastructural Manœuvres is an ongoing project of the Rietveld and Sandberg library; its aim is to foreground the role and possibilities of a library technical infrastructure, opening it up to reflection and experimentation.
The library of the Rietveld Academie and Sandberg Instituut has been recently relocated to a new building. The period of changes foreshadowed by the move, together with the need for a better catalogue system, has been taken by the librarians as an occasion to rethink the many elements that constitute the library, and the entangled relations between all these elements. Parallely to the redesigning of the library interior, and the commitment to an active public program of reading-groups, events and workshops, the project ‘Infrastructural Manœuvres’ was initiated.
The project consists of a series of changes in the software and network systems of the library and a series of collective situations aimed at discussing these choices and their broader socio-technical context. Instead of being set up by technicians as a service to the library, the new infrastructure comes from the library and its network, allowing it to reflect the way it wants to work, the concerns it wants to share and the collaborations it seeks.
Shifting away from just offering an interface to users-students, who are normally limited to a superficial interaction, the intention is rather to expose the catalogue and its interface/s to experiments and collaborations.
This way, the current discussion on the shifting role of libraries and digital books, is informed by practice, in the form of a series of hands-on workshops, aimed at introducing students to the creative possibilities of the new system.
The library becomes a site to explore the specific features of an art-school-catalogue in terms of publishing and archival practices, while the orientation towards the free-software community aims at connecting our experiences with other libraries and library-projects.
On the technical side of the catalog, we decided to move away from the previous proprietary library system and set up Evergreen ( http://evergreen-ils.org/ ), a free-software library system started and developed by the Library of Georgia. Free-software is not just an ‘ethical’ alternative to commercial software. The autonomy that comes with free open source software allows different types of usage and modifications.
The decision to part from the previous system was not just motivated by its limited capabilities, but as well by the implications of their “cloud service” model: the Library never had actual access to its own catalog, but only to an interface to the service provided by the company. We chose to renounce to this solution, that relieves from the need of understanding and caring for the catalog software, and start instead to question the separation between users and systems that cloud services implies.
The approach that was chosen, to share the development phase of the project through workshops and discursive moments, is motivated by the idea that there should not be a hard separation between the work of the technician and the work of those using a technical structure. I.M. attempts instead a generalist and collective approach to socio-technical issues.
This work is also informed by the different projects that stressed the importance of the political dimension of librarianship. This influence comes both from past attemps, and from contemporary projects, peers and friends that share our urgencies.
If you are interested to know more or to get involved, write us at infrastructuralmanoeuvres@rietveldacademie.nl