Creative Performance
William Denton, web librarian, York University
Adam Lauder, W.P. Scott Chair for Research in e-Librarianship, York University
Lisa Sloniowski, English literature librarian, York University
Abstract
Digitize and/or Destroy invites visitors to choose a book and then decide whether it should be digitized, destroyed or both—in whichever order they choose. Recognizing the role of libraries and archives in cultural production as well as in organizing and preserving material artifacts, this piece seeks to lay bare the everyday practices of digital preservation while at the same time producing a new digital corpus for future reuse and remixing. The technologies of archivization produce as well as store the historical record (Derrida, Archive Fever), and this performance draws attention to such production while simultaneously offering an allegorical interpretation of library outreach and engagement policies.
The performance involves a book cart filled with books, a digitization station and a destruction station. The visitor will first choose a book from a book cart, then decide which of digitize or destroy she wishes to do first. Whichever she chooses, she can also choose to do the other next, or not.
The digitization station is a table staffed by librarians in lab coats. When presented with an object they will digitize it, performing a simplified version of the workflow that librarians and archivists normally follow in preserving objects online. With cameras or scanners, they will digitize the object and add metadata elicited from the patron. A computer will be connected to a projector to show the digitization and folksonomic work on an adjacent screen or the wall in real time, making the process open, observable and performative.
The destruction station is also a table staffed with librarians in lab coats, but instead of a computer, they have a shredder. When presented with a book they will shred it and give the visitor the shredded remains in a clear plastic bag.
If the visitor goes to the digitization station first and then the destruction station, the chosen book will be digitized then destroyed. If the visitor goes to the destruction station then the digitization station, the shredded remains will be treated as realia and digitized as a sculpture would be.
All digital output will be available online under an open license for future reuse. York University Libraries will store the output in their digital repository.
This piece relates to the HASTAC theme of “ways of working [e.g.] methodologies” in that we are placing the archival processes of digitization on display as much as the objects themselves. Such transparency
is critical to digital scholarship if scholars, archivists and librarians wish to challenge the presumption of neutrality in selecting, ordering and exhibiting digital traces. Digitize and/or Destroy falls into the genre of performance art, being a performance at the intersection of emerging strategies and themes in library and information studies, digital humanities and fine arts.
Biographies
William Denton (www.miskatonic.org) has worked as web librarian at York University since 2007. His recent work includes “On Dentographs, A New Method of Visualizing Library Collections” and building an augmented reality view for the Alternative Campus Tour. In October 2012 he was part of “In Fear We Trust,” a Nuit Blanche performance at The Arts & Letters Club of Toronto, where he created and managed a site-specific wifi network with special content available only to the show’s visitors.
Adam Lauder is W.P. Scott Chair for Research in e-Librarianship at York University, where he is developing an online catalogue raisonné of the work of IAIN BAXTER&, the IAINBAXTER&raisonnE. He is also the author of a chapter on BAXTER& and the N.E. Thing Co. appearing in the YYZ title, Byproduct: On the Excess of Embedded Art Practices. Lauder is the author of articles on BAXTER& appearing in the journals Art Documentation, Technoetic Arts and The Journal of Canadian Art History. Lauder is also the editor of a book featuring new work by BAXTER&, H& IT ON (YYZ, 2012).
Lisa Sloniowski was hired at York University Libraries in 2004 and has worked as the English Literature librarian at York since 2005. Her research explores the role of libraries and archives in knowledge production, from the perspective of feminist and poststructuralist theory. In 2010 she was awarded a SSHRC standard research grant as co-investigator on the Feminist Porn Archive and Research Project with principal investigator Bobby Noble. She has also recently published an essay on feminist special collections and archives in a forthcoming Wilfred Laurier Press festschrift in honour of literary scholar Barbara Godard.
Pingback: Speculative Diction | HASTAC-y Goodness | University Affairs