TheAntisystemicLibraryWhyTo

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The Antisystemic Library

The principals of an anti-systemic library is that it does not have a catalogue, i.e. a hierarchical organisation of knowledge, instead it allows each library, each archivist and each researcher to use their own archiving and searching systems, based on their own bibliographies, languages, interests, politics and codes. The libraries that use these principles considered as a whole can be called 'The Anti-systemic Library'.

The Semantic Web

     "The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation."

• - Sir Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, Ora Lassila, The Semantic Web, Scientific American, May 2001.

Using computer readable data formats (such as Resource Description Framework) and programmable agents with which to collect and categorise them ('bots') the Semantic Web initiative is attempting to produce an information network with 'enriched' semantic coherence, while at the same time allowing local information to be described and enhanced locally. For example, describing my book collection, I use the category 'fascist propaganda' and someone else uses 'nazi counter-propaganda', or a word in a non-english language that means something similar. If we both use a computer readable syntax to describe our collections, we can programme a robot to link our libraries together. This robot would be able to read all our catalogues and infer that since we all have a number of identical books in these categories, that there is a semantic connection between fascist propaganda, nazi propaganda and the non-english word - and that the collections might be usefully grouped together.

The Distributed Library Project

Moxie, a Californian hacker and anarchist wrote a piece of software to catalogue and share books in his community. Since 2003 many small libraries have started using this (and related) pieces of software to catalogue their books and provide their communities with a system for sharing, lending and reviewing their collections of books, videos and music. There are now over 20 Distributed Library Project servers around the world. Using this as a starting point, the Antisystemic Library is starting to develop this software to allow people to archive and provide access to their collections of zines, maps, books, media and other resources. The next stage of development will be the publication of these archives on the Semantic Web, along with their interconnected cataloguing systems, and a system for linking Distributed Libraries and their individual archives together.

Why bother?

The rise of the Semantic Web and related technologies represents a change in how knowledge is stored, processed and represented. The distributed nature of the Semantic Web - that it allows localized descriptions, lends it to this kind of task - enabling idiosyncratic and non-standard archiving procedures to co-exist and become useful to all involved. It is also likely that without this kind of initiative, the Semantic Web is more likely to remain the exclusive domain of business, government and the military.

Public libraries are often wonderful spaces, and provide vital services (even if, in the UK at least, they are being underfunded and re-branded as 'knowledge stores') and many have been subject to censorship and poor management. Personal or private collections of books, flyers, zines, and small periodicals have tended to be obscure, hidden and difficult to access, as are their archiving processes and relationships with other materials. The potential of the Antisystemic Library is to provide access to knowledge that has previously had no commercial or officialised distribution infrastructure.

How To Join

The Antisystemic Library is not a group as such, but a number of groups employing related principles and software efforts. There is a mailing list here: http://lists.theps.net/mailman/listinfo/dlpdev for the discussion of the Antisystemic development of the Distributed Library Project software. There is another couple of lists and more resources related to the DLP software itself here: http://www.thoughtcrime.org/software/dlp/. There will also be some librarians involved in the DLP and the Antisystemic Library projects in Belgrade in Summer 2004.

Checkout: http://ourmayday.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?PeoplesGlobalActionConferenceIn_Belgrade

See if you want to get involved, please get in touch with the librarians from the London Action Resource Centre (http://londonarc.org) or from the University of Openess library (http://uo.theps.net/UoLibrary).