An underrated feature of physical books is how through used bookstores, estate sales, etc., they flirt with being a form of temporally resilient communal resource.
I have a couple books that are in their fifth century of life. They are not expensive or rare, just sets of words that have had 400+ years of people using them, kept in good shape and passed from caretaker to caretaker ("owner" isn't the right word in this case. I am caretaking for it. We are all librarians)
On this subject, lately I've become obsessed with personal libraries and archives, both physical and digital. I don't have a grand thesis yet, but there's something to the role an individual's practice of collecting and curating can lead to a distributed system of stored knowledge, particularly in arenas traditional institutions miss, but even just as a caretaking mentality, library as practice
@paul ahhhh I love this and this mentality! I hadn't seen Soundpipe but this is such an amazing example of this emerging definition of "library" I'm trying to explore. I love the module list, such a great example of documentation as something communicative, connective, and valuable
@Milouchkna aw that's so cool you did bookbinding! It's one of my dreams to finally have time to take some bookbinding classes. And I'll keep dreaming of a return to long fibers
@mncmncmnc very much love the idea of having your information well indexed, on file.
the technical means of archival is practically a prerequisite for any form of #memex.
@mncmncmnc you need to have the thing to begin to exercise self-determinism, figuring out how & where you wish to integrate the information article with the rest of your articles, informations, things, & perhaps likely even your own brain.
@mncmncmnc i obsess over what feels like a core lifelong gaeas, to make the computing real. to reify processes, objects, such that each can stand alone & be talked about, is graspable as a distinct thing.
https://cybre.space/@jauntywunderkind420/106615559775431425
kind of cryptic, but this paean to shells, for example, is because of what graspable things processes & files are & how the shell empowers one to view edit & script the environment & it's processes.
@jauntywunderkind420 ahhhh I love this shell image. Thanks for sharing it. The way you put "crunching" "pushing" data around is both poetic and true. I want your "Paean To Shells" manifesto now
@mncmncmnc gosh i love the use of the word "caretaker" in this context. ive been calling myself an "amateur archivist" (as opposed to a "data hoarder") lately, but i think i should be leaning more towards the idea of taking care of my data and curating it rather than just dumping it wholesale onto the cheapest hard drives i can find.
If you have more thoughts on this topic, i look forward to hearing them
@jaxter184 Yeah! Part of what I like about a librarian-like approach is it forces me to decide if I really *care* about each object that I could accumulate and hold. And if so, if the answer is yes, then that provides the motivation to care for it. But I think there's a place for the data hoarders too! For those who preserve the wholesale dumps. That to me can also be an important form of caretaking! Of preservation
@mncmncmnc I got home from presenting our city library's annual report to city council, and this post was in my timeline.
A lot of people who feel like you do tend to get involved with their public libraries. Many of the volunteers and fundraisers who support our local library are themselves excellent librarians, curating their own personal stacks. I try to emulate them. I've been considering building a physical card catalog for my own collection...
@mncmncmnc I love creating a personal library. I have a 'lib' category in dendron.so where I collect all the highlights of the articles and their notes, books, small poems etc.
I wish everyone had an accessible library so that we all could discover more stuff/recommendations/views without the elaborate social dance of getting familiar with everyone.
@mncmncmnc do you mean like this https://www.lucs.lu.se/LUCS/103/LUCS.103.pdf
@behemoth yes this is definitely part of it! Thank you so much for sharing this :)
@mncmncmnc I have this caretaking mentality with projects of mine like Soundpipe and sndkit to an extent. And that's a great way to describe it too: caretaking.
Originally, Soundpipe aimed to be a means to try and better preserve and curate the audio DSP algorithms found in computer music programs like Csound. In a way, I consider them my like my cultural heritage. I don't really feel a sense of "ownership" with these projects. More of a deep responsibility to ensure that the collective wisdom of computer musicians from past generations get properly passed down to the computer musicians of future generations.