Chicago Underground Library's blog

The Chicago Underground Library is pleased to announce Orphan Works, a new reinterpretation series. Unlike traditional reading series, our performers are not reading from their own work. Some of them won’t even be reading. We’re calling upon a variety of the most creative minds in Chicago to burrow deep into our collection of anonymous works or ones for which no further information on the author can be found. Commonly referred to as “Orphan Works,” these lost publications will be brought back to life: read, reinterpreted, and reunited with the audience they’ve been missing. There is an ongoing debate on the status of works like these, and a number of groups and individuals are fighting to keep them free for creative reuse and artistic exploration.

indieWIRE has an interesting article written by Brian Newman of NVR (National Video Resources, media granting arm of the Rockefeller Foundation) on the reasons behind the decline of nonprofit membership organizations for independent film and media. A lot of the points, taken separately, seem like pretty common sense stuff, but taken as a whole they present a very cogent picture of where and why certain strategies fail and others work. Don't miss the comments, either. They're all really insightful, and will give you an idea of the bigger picture behind the support structure for the independent film community. A compellingly odd take on why people are choosing DIY.

http://www.indiewire.com/biz/2006/03/first_person_br.html

No, he hasn't been locked up, pulled over, or buried under a collapsed bookshelf of "Understanding Comics."

Scott McCloud is giving away parts 1 & 2 of his graphic novel "The Right Number" here, and intends to put part 3 alongside them when it's completed.

Web comics are nothing new (in fact, I also have an unfinished graphic novel online-- as I'm assuming do most people who have ever dipped their feet in that pond) and they're especially not new to McCloud, who was one of the earliest comic artists to seize the internet for his own devices (and, because he's Scott McCloud and has always done things with a bigger picture than himself in mind, the devices of the entire comics community).

But what's really interesting to me is that before giving it away, McCloud tried a micropayments distribution system to get it out there.

From The Nation: America's founders understood the First Amendment would be worth little without a postal system that encouraged broad public participation in America's "marketplace of ideas." Thomas Jefferson called for a postal service that allowed ideas to "penetrate the whole mass of the people." Along with James Madison, he paved the way for a system that gave low-cost mailing incentives to small publications.

I'm not sure why it strikes me as so odd to be using a blog to suggest that people pick up a magazine, considering our entire collection is paper-based and this blog is in fact a blog of a paper magazine.

This month's Harper's (May 2007, unfortunately not on their website yet, if you can't get it on a newsstand, just wait a couple of weeks) has an article on just that digital/paper dissonance, and presents an incredibly in-depth view of the Prelinger Archive in San Francisco. Never have I been so inspired to take our entire collection and organize it according to an esoteric whim, then continue to reorganize it ad infinitum.

I received this message out of the blue, and for anyone else who values their local public libraries, I hope it scares you as much as it scares me. Apparently the chair of the board of trustees for the Providence Public Library has announced plans to close most of the cities libraries. Why? She says libraries aren't about the buildings.

I'd like to see a library function without its building. As the people who have rallied to save the libraries have pointed out, a library isn't "just a book warehouse."

We couldn't function without our building, and our building is a file cabinet in the basement of a coffeeshop. Even just that means a lot for a community. Now add on all the things Providence's Public Libraries will also take away, and you end up with kids without places to do homework, people without internet access unable to access even basic information, fewer venues in the city for public use, not to mention all of the jobs and education opportunities lost.

D.I.Y is usually something we think of when we look at a zine or a really pretty hand-felted wallet; things that are finished. Things that were Done._.Yourself.

A large part of the enjoyment I get out of other peoples' D.I.Y projects, though, is getting to imagine the process of Doing. As in, how the hell did they do that? Even the simplest stitch has to be learned. Someone has to teach us how to un-jam the copier at Kinkos. And in that process, it's inevitable that things don't always work right the first time. Or the second.

Let's say you wanted to start a library. And you wanted that library to have a website. Let's say that you were neither a librarian nor knew the first thing about web design.