#a working library

[binsofchaos]

[quartey]

Mandy Brown, on the need for a third text state

But the weight analogy sticks: we talk of edits to a text as being either “heavy” or “light,” recalling the lead type that was once necessary to make them. The physical weight may be gone—displaced by word processors and infinitely light pixels—but that mental heaviness persists.

As does the idea of a fixed, crystallized, final work. Even our digital systems mimic the immutableness of ink on paper. Typos and egregious errors are routinely repaired in online texts, but rarely are “heavier” changes made. Ebooks can be updated, but only dumbly: a new file will wipe out annotations made to an earlier version, and no useful convention yet exists for communicating what was changed and why. Our content management systems know of only two states—draft and published—either privately in progress or publicly neglected. Nowhere is there a third state—in the world, but still evolving.

... Perhaps it is time for the margins to swell to the same size as the text.

(via A Working Library)

[quartey]

Represent

Mandy Brown on how the best publishers serve as representatives of and advocates for their communities:

But there’s a point just a few steps beyond belonging that is perhaps even more important: advocating. Belonging to a community means participating, observing, and generally being in attendance (either physically or virtually). But being an advocate requires stepping forward and helping to articulate that community’s needs, or advance their interests, or—when necessary—protect their rights. You need to both amplify and clarify the values of a community, not merely share them.

In practice, this means identifying what your community needs to prosper, and either providing that directly or advocating for its provisioning. There are many ways to do this. You can lobby for changes the community needs (e.g., by publishing content illustrating those needs and defining how change should happen); you can facilitate discussions (e.g., by hosting and supporting safe, productive forums); you can challenge the status quo (e.g., by bringing in ideas from outside the community and fostering discussion); and so on. It means acknowledging that your content is a means to an end, and making sure the ends are good ones.

(via A Working Library)

[quartey]

"The library of Alexandria served not as a place of creativity, but rather as a kind of well-kept tomb for the creativity of the past . . . Alexandria came to be the largest library of its time largely by force: works of literature were confiscated from any and all visitors. But in its supreme effort to collect, it failed to understand the purpose of a collection itself: to serve as fertile ground for new works. Perhaps, in the scheme of things, we are better off that such a library was lost." (via A Working Library)

[jarrettfuller]

Sometimes I wish there was a script I could plug in that would automatically link to new articles posted by certain writers. Mandy Brown of [A Working Library](http://www.aworkinglibrary.com) is one of those writers. Everything is pure gold and her most recent post discussing the state of journalism, news, The New York Times, and paywalls is simply brilliant: >[T]he *Times* paywall does not map to my reading behavior. I don’t read a single source for the news—I read thousands. I consume the news from all directions—from venerable institutions like the Times, to blogs that obsess over particular topics, to tweets from witnesses, and every imaginable source in between. I want news that is the aggregate of all these sources, that admits all of these varying (and often contrary) perspectives. Erecting paywalls between these locations misunderstands the ecosystem that each story participates in. The value I find in the news today is in its connectedness—in the ways in which often divergent sources come together to create a story—not its solitary authority. This is a fascinating insight that I had not considered when thinking about why the paywall rubbed me the wrong way. Like many others, I was concerned about the general complication and confusion about the setup and pricing structure as well the fact that it's hard when something that was free gets taken away. I don't want to pay for something I got for free for so long. But this idea of the *connected story*? This was new to me, yet in retrospect feels completely obvious. It started seven years ago when I set up my first RSS reader and started compiling the sites I visited each day. The way I got my news, in that moment, changed and it's only deepened since. The *Times* wants me to pay because they think they will be my number one, go-to source, except that's not the kind of world we live in anymore. >So what does this new world of news look like? It looks like Instapaper, or Readability, or perhaps Flipboard, if Flipboard can learn how to aggregate information in a way that makes sense. It looks like 1-Click, or Kickstarter, or Amazon’s singles. It looks like tools for making timelines or managing primary sources. It looks like dispatches from people on the ground. It looks like startups we haven’t seen yet, because a few smart people (perhaps exiles from newsroom layoffs) are right at this moment looking at the reactions to the Times and starting to plan for how they can do better. It’s both dispersed and connected, social but not inane, reliable and diverse. It looks like many things, because there isn’t going to be a single way forward; the future is, as ever, more complicated than the past. So what is the future of news consumption? It's incredibly personal, customized to each consumer yet, in the same breath, it's beautifully connected, allowing us to see the larger stories unfolding around us.

[austinkleon]

Always read with a pen in hand. The pen should be used both to mark the text you want to remember and to write from where the text leaves you. Think of the text as the starting point for your own words.

Mandy Brown, "Ways of reading"