To Build a Library

We also provide a digitization workstation, so image-rich materials can be scanned in at high resolution. Guests can take with them on disk digital copies of whatever they would like to use in their own work. One filmmaker scanned in beautiful graphic images from 1950s and 1960s graphic arts magazines, to use as stills in her film. Another filmmaker is planning to shoot stills from a 1940s magazine that she intends to animate on screen. One university art seminar that visited the library was assigned by their professor to find materials in the library that could be used for agit-prop, in fifteen minutes of browsing. So far eight university classes have made field trips to the library, and the best library days are those when the rows hum with curious browsers. The library's goal of providing associative browsing as an option to query-based research has been validated by visits from university scholars who come to us to find materials that may very well exist in their own libraries, but which they could not discover there.

The copy machine and the digitization work station are the best access points we are currently able to provide. They are the ways we make the library appropriation-friendly, to encourage artists and other creative users as well as idea-driven researchers. In the long run, we would like to digitize and put online for free download all of the public domain materials in the collection. Doing so will make the library meta-useful, and enable it to reach a far wider reading public.

Bad Subjects: To Build a Library