12 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
12 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
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title = "Digital library: a road not taken"
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glassblowers = ["tomislavmedak.md"]
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In the 1990s, public libraries and archives went through a radical transformation and change of their social function. Providing access to text, audio and video on physical media such as documents, printed books, CDs and DVDs has begun to be complemented with the provision of access to text, audio and video over digital networks. Users suddenly were given the opportunity to access from their home, school or work the works of culture and science on that were on the library's server and that the library has undertaken to digitize. This expansion of access to digital wroks without economic barriers ended the need for the production of cultural works to depend on markets and encouraged societies to decommodify cultural production and make creative work publicly funded. It was only a matter of time before libraries and archives turned into production and dissemination platforms for literature, music and film.
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Using the ever expanding digital networks, libraries then endavoured to develop online services for their communities, while communities have embraced these services and pushed the libraries to make these services as useful channels for communication, organization and sharing of goods as possible. Libraries began to train users in order to become as technologically and communicationally literate as possible and to be able to assist in the development, maintenance and adaptation of these online services for their immediate communities.
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As the creation, dissemination and reading became intimately entangled, strict boudaries between formerly market-dominated functions of authors, publishers and readers dissolved. Science was already well on its way to becoming the commons, so public libraries expanded their range of activities and started to actively mediate science to the public, helping the public to more easily understand and interpret the complexities and uncertainties of the globalized society that they encounter through information channels from the infinite knowledge of science offers.
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This counterfactual story in which public libraries and archives become the central place of cultural production and informal learning in our digital societies has unfortunately very few resemblances with the actual developments over the past three decades with digital networks, their growing marketization and the commercialization of production and access to culture and knowledge. The story is completely unconvincing, naive and embarrassing for our cynical view, trained on the realities of 2020s. Today private digital platforms and online services have come to dominate over the increasingly thin public services and public institutions in the provision of access to culture and knowledge. Technocapitalist platforms and commodified culture dominate. However, the stories that turned into our sobering reality at their onset were often unconvincing, naive and embarrassing, like those of two students from Stanford who decided to create a non-commercial search engine for all the information in the world (which, by the way, would become the biggest advertising machine of today) or of a former quant from Wall Street who decided selling books will is a good stepping stone to building a universal store (which will become the biggest sales machine today). Stories foster imaginaries, imaginaries orient actions in social realities, the meeting of imaginaries with social realities result in unexpected outcomes.
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