centar za nove medije_kuda.org

Monday / Tuesday, 15/16. July 2013.

Time: 17-20h

Place: Youth Center CK13, Novi Sad, Vojvode Bojovića 13

The workshop was conceptualized and led by: Marcell Mars, Zagreb

Organized by: kuda.org

Contacts for registration of participants: anica.stojanovic@ck13.org or office @ kuda.org

Public library means free access to books for everyone, library catalog, librarians. With books you are willing to share, meticulously cataloged, everyone is a librarian. When everyone is a librarian, the library is everywhere. In technical terms, there is nothing that prevents us from realizing the dream of universal access to knowledge on the Internet. Yet not only have public libraries not flourished in the age of the Internet, but we are witnessing the decline of infrastructure, social institutions, and the reach of civilization that we as a human race can be proud of. Public libraries are failing due to the restrictive legal regime of intellectual property and, more recently, due to austerity measures justified by the economic crisis. The world's largest publishers do not allow public libraries to buy e-books, and those who allow them to purchase then apply lending counting technologies so that a new e-book must be purchased after every 26 borrowings (?!?). Disabled in the transformations required by technological development, in a world that knows only the state of permanent (economic) crisis, it is easy to imagine that public libraries will completely disappear in the relatively near future. In many fields of creative production, the development of software tools has enabled the involvement and significant contribution of amateurs. This has happened in the field of design with Photoshop and Illustrator, architecture with 3D and CAD programs, journalism with platforms for easy publishing of content on the Internet (WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger ...), photography with digital cameras, and more recently with Instagram, astronomy today almost impossible to imagine without an army of amateurs observing space and processing data (SETI @ Home). The field of librarianship got its amateurs with Caliber and Zotero software, and archives and repositories with millions of books in projects like The Pirate Bay, Gigapedia / Library.nu, Library Genesis, Aaaaarg.org, Ubu.com, Monoskop.org... This workshop will introduce you to the world of amateur librarianship in an attempt to realize the dream of universal access to knowledge and the struggle for the survival of public libraries. The first part of the workshop will introduce you to Caliber (http://calibre-ebook.com/) software tool that will allow each end user to easily create and maintain personal book catalogs. With Caliber, you can easily transfer a book to your e-reader and convert it from one e-book format to another when needed. With the [let's share books] software tool (https://github.com/marcellmars/letssharebooks), your catalog will be available to everyone online. At the workshop we will share knowledge and skills: * how to find books on the Internet: libgen.org (about a million books), aaaaarg.org (a community of researchers with a selection of over 25,000 books) ... * how to catalog books in Caliber * how to exchange books and catalogs * how to merge catalogs with others into a single library accessible to everyone * how to transfer a book and then read it on electronic readers (eg Amazon Kindle, B&N Nook, Sony PRS- *, BeBook Neo, Apple iPad ...) * how to remove protection after purchase on Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble ... * how to use an electronic reader (adjust the display, annotations, bookmark, dictionary ...) * how to automate the preparation of bibliographic data for writing texts * how to research in (online) Collaboration Participants should have their own laptops and the ability to install Caliber software. Caliber can be installed on all operating systems: Windows, OSX, and Linux.

More about the Public Library project: http://www.memoryoftheworld.org/

The workshop is part of a two-day program dedicated to discussing contemporary practices of archiving knowledge and art on the Internet: avant-garde and neo-avant-garde art, (visual) poetry, experimental music, art books, etc. solely for the purpose of making the material available to all for potential research and (self-) education.

The program will bring together in public discussions the initiators and "archivists" such as:

Kenneth Goldsmith from the USA, poet, and artist leading the UbuWeb project (http://www.ubuweb.com/),

Dušan Barok, an artist and activist from Slovakia, who launched the Monoscope project (http://monoskop.org/Monoskop), and Simon Worthington, a programmer who co-initiated the Hybrid Media Publishing project and the Mute magazine in London (www.metamute.org).

Marcell Mars aka Nenad Romić was born in 1972 in Zagreb. He is known in the wider community as a fighter for free software, as a cultural researcher, and as a social provocateur. Marcell is one of the founders of the Multimedia Institute - mi2, as well as the club for network culture mama from Zagreb. He initiated the establishment of the publishing house EGOBOO.bits, which is based on the use of GNU GPL licenses, launched regular informal gatherings of enthusiasts in the club Mama called "Skills Exchange", as well as a whole chain of related gatherings in the region called "g33koskop", "Nothing will happen ”and“ Fucked Equipment Fair ”.

The workshop is realized within the project "Extended aesthetic education: artistic experiment and political culture in the age of networks" (www.aestheticeducation.net), which takes place in cooperation with several organizations: Multimedia Institute from Zagreb, Counterpoint from Skopje, Berliner Gazette, Mute from London and kuda.org from Novi Sad.

The project is supported by the Culture Program 2007-2013 of the European Commission. The project was additionally supported by: the European Cultural Foundation, the Swiss Cultural Program for the Western Balkans, the Provincial Secretariat for Culture and Public Information, the Ministry of Culture and Information of the Republic of Serbia.