CategoriesGameSheets
From UoWiki
[edit] MAKE YOUR OWN LIBRARY STEP BY STEP GUIDE
Along with private collections of books, magazines and videos, many people have hordes of printed texts, photocopies and ephemera that has no existing storage, retrieval or distribution system. All you need to start your own mailable ephemera library is an old mailbag, sewing equipment, and some interesting printed or photocopied texts, flyers, one-off zines or pamphlets.
1. The hardest part of creating a shared and distributive library from your uncatalogued collection of ephemera is deciding how to categorize what is in it. Play this game to get your taxonomical process loosened up.
- Tear off the game sheets on the right and give one to each player.
- Agree together on 8 categories and write them in the boxes along the top of the sheet. eg: animals, dead people, etc.
- To start a round, a player picks a letter of the alphabet at random and everyone then tries to write a thing beginning with that letter in each category.
- The first player to have a word in each category calls 'stop' to end the round.
- Discuss the validity of things assigned in each category, assigning points through consensus. This is where the fun is.
- Keep playing rounds (with different players picking different letters each time) until the sheet is full (8 is enough).
- Scoring:
- two players have the same thing = 1 point each
- player has unique valid thing = 2 points
- player has the only valid thing = 3 points
2. Develop a more interesting and productive catagorization system for your ephemera.
- If you have a computer and an internet connection register with the online bookmark-sharing system http://del.icio.us (or similar).
- Now bookmark the urls relating to each of the printed texts you want to put in your library (if they have urls).
- When you bookmark them, tag each url with keywords to help you categorize and recall the text on the page.
- You will be able to see if and how other people have bookmarked and tagged your texts, and what else they categorized with the same tags.
3. Share your ephemera in a mailable library that allows other to re-categorise your collection of texts.
- Follow the diagrams and instructions on the right to create foldable, mailable library/archive units.
- Fill with texts and ephemera, then write and affix sticky 'tags' to each pocket that work as keywords for each text.
- Catalogue your texts by pocket if you feel like it. i.e. have all texts that relate to games in one pocket, all that relate to language in another.
- Fold them up and mail them to friends, or hang them in your home/office/library.
[edit] A FEW HELPFUL HINTS
- Try and make your categories generic enough so that they can fit a wide variety of documents but specific enough that the documents can be differentiated.
- Consider cataloguing the rest of your library online also at the Distributed Library Project: http://dlp.theps.net
design accross the top:
[edit] The Mailable Text Library: Keeping your ephemera in neat foldable bags is nice and practical, but it also allows you to share your library. This design is light, cheap to produce and easy to move around by mail or by hand.
a). Cut the mailbag into one long strip about 16 ins. wide and the entire depth of the mailbag. Cut the rest of the bag into A4 sized pocket shapes.
b). Sew an additional pocket for pens and sticky labels onto the front of the bottom pocket.
c). Lay all the pieces flat, fold and pin the edges of all the pockets, then sew them all down.
NB: process may vary depending on mailbag design.
