| Collection Title: | Scrolled Score |
| Identification/URL: | https://scrolledscore.memoryoftheworld.org |
| Creator: | Memory of the World |
| Abstract: | A variety of actors in different contexts play by interpreting, performing, enacting or executing a score, a screenplay, a script or a set of instructions. Musicians thus play their music, directors do their theater shows or movies, chefs prepare their meals, gamemasters and player characters pursue their campaigns so that dragons could fly over the dungeons of the world. Likewise, computers - machinic proxies of human actors - execute sets of instructions to manipulate data.
According to Markus Krajewski, index card catalog can be viewed as a precursor of digital computing. Card catalog, with its separate index cards that can be added at any location in the catalog cabinet following a classification system, conceptually reassembles Turing's universal discrete machine with writing/reading head (or scriptor), an infinite paper band partitioned into discrete steps (or slips), and an unambiguous set of instructions for reading and writing data. What an index card is to a book in print, that is metadata to a digital book. To search for an author, title or subject in a library collection, one needs to leaf through an endless stack of index cards in an endless stack of drawers. Whereas to search for an author, title or subject in a digital library collection, one needs to query its bibliographic metadata - frequently receiving for a query as broad as 'score' a list of results so long that one needs to scroll down many times to see them all. The Scrolled Score is a result of the query 'score' against the Memory of the World shadow library. What an index card is to a book, that is a repertorium to a collection. This repertorium describes the Scrolled Score collection, compiled from all the digital books returned from the query 'score' against the Memory of the World shadow library. The results are compiled into a separate collection of scores that gamemasters, chefs, actors, musicians, readers, writers, computers, librarians and others can download and play to. |
| Acquisition Information: | Scrolled Score is created from a query against the Memory of the World collection. The collection is created by contributions of a collective of amateur librarians. Memory of the World's larger aim is to publicly support scenarios for massive disobedience against the current regulation of production and circulation of knowledge and culture in the digital realm. The starting point for the Memory of the World project is a simple consideration: public library is the institutional form that societies have devised in order to make knowledge and culture accessible to all their members regardless of social or economic status. Yet, as digital networks have radically expanded the access to literature and scientific research, public libraries were largely denied the ability to extend to digital "objects" the kind of de-commodified access they provide in the world of print. By building tools for organizing and sharing electronic libraries, creating digitization workflows, and making books available online, the Memory of the World project is aimed at helping to fill the space that remains denied to real-world public libraries. It is a shadow library among many. |
| Conditions Governing Access: |
The set of instructions is simple:
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| Biographical/Historical Information: | Public Library/Memory of the World was initiated in 2012 upon the invitation of Kiberpipa to curate their biannual HAIP festival in Ljubljana. Conceived at a moment where public libraries came under threat of austerity measures and where the networked infrastructures of sharing came under an increased threat of closing, it was aimed at strengthening and connecting those infrastructures and provoking debates that addressed the imposed and implicit territorial, socio-economic and legal barriers to the universal access to knowledge. Since this initial outing, Public Library continued to be developed and presented a.o. in dedicated exhibitions at Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart, Galerija Nova under What, how and for whom/WHW in Zagreb, Galerija SULUV under Kuda.org in Novi Sad, in collective exhibitions 'Dear Art' at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova in Ljubljana and 'Really Useful Knowledge in the Museum Reina Sofia in Madrid, in hackathons at Impakt festival in Utrecht, in Post-Digital Publishing workshop at Transmediale in Berlin, in Archive/Anarchive/Public Library workshop at Kuda.org in Novi Sad, in the residencies at Constant in Bruxelles, Calafou in Barcelona, MayDay Rooms in London and Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. |
| Subjects: | score, catalog, metadata, shadow library, public library, universal access to knowledge |