# The Library Is Open

## Special Issue 09

### Piet Zwart Institute

Dear readers,
The Library Is Open invites you to an afternoon of workshops that make the operations within libraries visible. Join us in exploring the actions and roles of legal and extra-legal libraries (municipal, pirate, academic, +++), their custodians, and the public that form a community around collections of texts.

Marginal Conversations
We read texts, and write notes in the margins; usually in private, isolated from other readers. We come across texts with others' notes on them; the author unknown, their thoughts obscure. What happens when we share our notes, vocalise and perform them?

In this workshop...we'll read, annotate and discuss an open letter which asks for pirate library practices to come out from the shadows. We'll read aloud and perform parts of the text, enriched by our doubts, sympathies, tensions and diverse understandings. We'll personalise the text, opening it up for collective conversations. Our voices will occupy the space and leave traces on the text and in the library.

Knowledge In Action
Through role play you will perform the activities crucial to the sustenance of libraries. You will interpret and reimagine the actors that take part in knowledge production and distribution, such as the librarian, the researcher, the pirate, the publisher, the reader, the writer, the student, the copyist, the printer.

The workshop consists of three activities where different scenarios shift your accustomed perspective to start common dialogues. Put yourselves in the shoes of the librarian, imagine together a reading space, and contest the morality of knowledge proprietization.

Blurry Boundaries
Select, annotate, analyze, scan, correct, digitize, print, read, transfer, erase, encode, curate, hack, interface, work, copy...
How do we reveal the hidden labour involved in these processes? What libraries become possible when you transform physical books into digital files, and vice versa?

In this workshop you will be a librarian converting books into machine readable files, a process involving tools, time and choices.

Contributors:
Simon Browne, Tancredi Di Giovanni, Paloma García, Rita Graça, Artemis Gryllaki, Pedro Sá Couto, Femke Snelting, Biyi Wen, Bohye Woo

Special thanks to:
Bodó Balázs, Dušan Barok, Anita Burato, André Castro, Aymeric Mansoux, Michael Murtaugh, Martino Morandi, Leslie Robbins, Steve Rushton, Amy Suo Wu, Eva Weinmayr