Jeffrey Schnapp

As this year’s edition of the Library Test Kitchen wraps up, the role of spaces of silence, contemplation, refuge and retreat in the library of the future has emerged as a frequent topic of conversation.  For several decades now, libraries have striven to become network hot spots, informationally “hotter” than potential rival public spaces like coffee houses. In so doing, they have quite properly built upon their traditional identity as information hubs and sites of…
 
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Trend-tracking isn’t my day job. But in my own shuttling back and forth between physical and digital curation, scholarship, and teaching, I’m regularly struck by the ways in which the normativity of screen culture today is intensifying urges for sensorially richer, more tactile forms of experience and communication. From the revival of knitting and other forms of manual craft to the chapbook subculture that seems to be spreading worldwide to makers fairs, “analog” modes of…
 
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For Bibliotheca II, the library test kitchen being generously funded by Harvard’s Library Lab, my collaborator Jeff Goldenson and I are planning to develop projects of our own alongside the student developed projects. I have two currently in mind on which I’m planning to work with Jeff, fellow metaLAB founder Bobby Pietrusko and other team members (tbd). The first, entitled the Livebrary is a data visualization appliance that exposes the multilayered life of the Harvard…
 
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Bibliotheca I has a successor: Bibliotheca II. The fall seminar that I co-taught with my friend and fellow Berkmanite John Palfrey last semester at the Harvard Graduate School of Design was built around three nodes: the history of the library as an institution from antiquity to the present; case studies in the design and construction of contemporary libraries; and the development, design and discussion of elements that might make up the library of the future. So…
 
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When proclaiming the advent of a new photo-driven mass communications vernacular, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy coined the neologism TYPOPHOTOGRAPHY in the mid-1920s. The label may not have stuck. But the conviction that underwrote it did: namely, that offset lithography, photography, telegraphy, telephony, radio, moving pictures (and, later, video, television, and electronic data networks), shaped by and shaping, in turn, new social needs and expectations, had disrupted the galaxy of the Gutenberghian book and created the preconditions for a…
 
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In the course of metaLAB’s participation in the Digital Public Library of America project, I have become increasingly concerned not just with how to design DPLA as a user-centered platform, but also with how to build bridges between DPLA and the 17,000 public library facilities in existence today in the United States. Local public libraries play a multitude of key roles with respect to the communities that they serve and these roles cannot simply be displaced by waving a digital…
 
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My friend John Palfrey and I have had the pleasure of co-teaching a terrific fall seminar at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design on the past, present and future of libraries, expertly helped out by Ann Whiteside (the director of the Loeb Library) and Jeff Goldenson (from the Library Innovation Lab). The seminar’s home in an architecture school has helped to drive the discussion towards a key question that confronts (and haunts–today is Halloween!) conversations regarding…
 
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The Digital Archive of Japan’s 2011 Disasters, metaLAB’s collaboration with our friends at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, is representative of our efforts to build a state-of-the-art archive of an event hovering in the limbo between the “historical” and the “unfinished and underway.” Built on a multi-pronged partnership with such collaborators as the Diet National Library of Japan, the Sendai Mediatheque, and Yahoo Japan, assembling everything from photographs shot by ordinary citizens to twitter…
 
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Like logos, labels are important. (And for many of the same reasons.) Labels do some heavy lifting with respect to the articulation of new or emerging concepts of history and culture: concepts that, in turn, reshape both scholarly practice and our understanding of the missions performed by institutions of memory such as libraries, archives and museums. One that I made up a decade ago but that I’ve continued to find useful is “the animated archive,” by which…
 
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The Trento Tunnels “architectural recycling” project was recently awarded third prize in the SMART URBAN STAGE competition being held in a variety of European cities as part of the launch of the new all-electric Smart car. The cities in question are Frankfurt, Milan, Cologne, Rome, Zurich, London, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Brussels, Madrid and Paris. The competition is integral to a broader initiative on the Future of the City: a global online project that seeks to promote…
 
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