Title: Public Library
Editors: Tomislav Medak, Marcell Mars, and What, How & for Whom/WHW
Authors: Marcell Mars, Manar Zarroug & Tomislav Medak, Paul Otlet, McKenzie Wark
Publishers: What, How & for Whom / WHW & Multimedia Institute, Zagreb
Format: 144 pages, 12 x 22 cm
ISBN: 978-953-7372-27-9
From the main essay:
Public Library is an entry in the catalog of History where a fantastic decimal describes a category of phenomenon that—together with free public education, a free public healthcare, the scientific method, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Wikipedia, and free software, among others—we, the people, are most proud of. The public library is a part of these invisible infrastructures that we start to notice only once they begin to disappear. A utopian dream—about the place from which every human being will have access to every piece of available knowledge that can be collected—looked impossible for a long time, until the egalitarian impetus of social revolutions, the Enlightment idea of universality of knowledge, and the expcetional suspenssion of the comercial barriers to access to knowledge made it possible.
Further essays in the book:
— Marcell Mars, Manar Zarroug & Tomislav Medak: Public Library
— Paul Otlet: Transformations in the Bibliographical Apparatus of the Sciences
— McKenzie Wark: Metadata Punk
—Tomislav Medak: The Future After the Library. UbuWeb and Monoskop’s Radical Gestures