Library Program_010


“In several dozen nondescript office buildings around the world, thousands of hourly workers bend over table-top scanners and haul dusty books into high-tech scanning booths. They are assembling the universal library page by page.”
-Kevin Kelly, from NY Times

One really only needs a computer with Internet access in order to access a vast, constant growing global network of information spanning nearly every imaginable topic. If information is currently being archived and documented in this manner, where does leave the actual library? Is the library in danger of becoming extinct, falling prey to the vast database and archiving power of the Internet? Probably not, because the library has the ability to offer a multi-sensory physical experience of being able to interact with a range of mediatype's.
The Bowery library than can act as a receptacle, or a filter, allowing for a constantly changing collection, through a residual build up and archiving of local information, outputting this into the global information network.

“Sponges play an important roll in aquatic ecosystems, acting to filter particles out of the water (especially bacteria), and forming a fairly substantial portion of the coral reef biomass. “

The sponge offers a precedent for a library organizational system. Water enters the sponge through a vast network of pores (Ostium), in which are a series of specialized cells that have very different performative qualities; Choanocyte's act to control the flow of water and collect food, Amoebocyte's help to digest the food, Pinacocytes make up the “skin,” and the secretion of spicules that make up the internal mesh work, or structural system are carried out by Sclerocytes. Similar to the sponge, cell's with differing performative qualities can start to organize into, and make up the library. A topical injection of library into the Bowery offers a destination, rather than just a place for research. The library would act similar to that of the sea sponge, drawing people to constantly flow through, and interact on a very personal and intimate level with a constantly changing and evolving archive of residual media left from other people moving through the library. How does the archiving system work? Maybe the librarian's role becomes similar to that of the street hawkers one would find on the Bowery at the end of the last century, drawing people into the library and helping to collect and archive differing media types from them.