Sublime

Public libraries are often seen as “opportunity institutions,” opening doors to, and for, the disenfranchised.

A public library today has information to improve people’s lives. We are an enabler; we are a connector.

maps can serve as “tools for social transformation”; that they can “produce worlds instead of simply reflecting them.”

Undergirding the geographies of suspension were networks in furious motion, continual overstimulation, and exhaustive exertion.

It’s all too easy to overlook the rush of activity that enables privileged retreat; the Othered precarity that ensures our security; the tangle of urban, regional, national, and global socio-technical networks that support our local stasis — unless we are ourselves a node within those essential systems, or unless we experience the repercussions of ... See more

“librarians are what the internet is aching for—people on task to care about the past, with respect to the past and also to what it shall bequeath to the future.” Can we reimagine libraries for the digital age?

In a world of perpetual data overload, [curation] implies information design and selectivity: the channeling, filtering, and organization into intelligible and usable information; the digging up of new or long ignored cultural corpora. Most of these corpora are simply sitting in storage: less than 1% of the Smithsonian Institution’s permanent colle... See more