DIY History Site (University of Iowa Libraries)
One thing that stood out to me in learning about Participatory Libraries in Module 4 was the University of Iowa Library’s DIY History site, a crowdsourced project calling on community members to help accelerate their digitization efforts by transcribing and tagging collection items (University of Iowa Libraries, n.d.). What stood out to me about this project is how directly it involves the public in the archival process with participants essentially learning to be librarians and archivists themselves. This is an essential skillset in an age when any serious information consumer is already working as something of a librarian. As Hadi & Gerson (2023) put it, “the internet has allowed archives to become something that can be created and preserved, collectively. Online, everything is archived, and everyone is an archivist.”
Some of the most useful online resources come from crowdsourced and/or DIY efforts. These include old standards like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive but also less-visible ones – “shadow libraries” like Z-Library and Anna’s Archive which offer enormous free collections of academic pdfs and commercial ebooks (Meyers, 2013) or torrent communities like the film archive Karagarga, which has long been a strong preservationist force against the ephemerality of commercial streaming services (“Karagarga,” 2015). One my favorite DIY archival models in this mold to have emerged in music communities recently are artist-based “trackers“, sprawling, shared Google sheets that attempt to comprehensively trace the complete recorded output of popular and cult musicians alike, documenting otherwise unattainable music (fan leaks, Instagram snippets) and other mixed media content, often dating back to the artists’ pre-fame years. (TrackerHub, n.d.)
Playboi Carti Tracker (Google Sheets)
There are few obvious problems with these types of DIY archives, though. The biggest of these is a matter of legality – more often than not these fans obviously do not have any right to duplicate or distribute this media. The Internet Archive, for instance, has been on the losing end of a high profile copyright case brought by book publishers (Knibbs, 2024). But also there are often issues with preservation, searchability, accessibility and (especially) fidelity. I can’t tell you how often I look at Instagram and see a would-be mind blowing historical photograph except it was digitized via an iPhone photo taken at a weird angle, riddled with lens flare.
In her 2011 meme/manifesto, “The User Is Not Broken,” library blogger K.G. Schneider (2006) notes “The OPAC is not the sun. The OPAC is at best a distant planet, every year moving farther from the orbit of its solar system,” but I wonder if these emerging information networks even constitute the same galaxy anymore. It’s hard to imagine any formal library inquiry that would lead a patron to the Playboi Carti Tracker. Nor is it likely that the average Playboi Carti Tracker-contributor would be consulting a formal library in their research or process. So my question then is how can we bridge these two universes? On one hand you have a mass of civilians who are intuitively doing essential archival work and on the other libraries that could potentially offer the exact sort of technical and institutional support that these armchair archivists are often lacking. I’d love to see a library program that could somehow integrate these more fringe digital resources into their existing databases or one that could help to put their creators on a path towards acquiring proper legal clearances for this type of work. (The intellectual property anarchist in my heart dreams of a traditional library system that is completely unmoored from copyright law but sadly I don’t think that will ever become a reality.)
One interesting development in this direction has been the rise of Memory Labs, library makerspaces dedicated to democratizing the archival process. Public libraries in places like San Diego and Los Angeles provide studios where community members can access scanners, 360-degree cameras and other digitization technology to preserve their own personal histories (Bhatia, 2024). Most of the Memory Lab conversation seems focused on analog-to-digital conversions but I wonder if these labs could expand to also encourage the preservation of born-digital content and give the citizen archivists of the internet better means to properly encode, organize, preserve, and disseminate their efforts.
DIY Digi Lab (San Francisco Public Library)
References:
Bhatia, J. (2024, October 2). At the library, in the lab, saving history. Mellon Foundation. https://www.mellon.org/article/at-the-library-in-the-lab-saving-history
Hadi, R. & Gerson. (2023, April 25). Why community archives are a radical approach to archiving. Scratching The Surface. https://scratchingthesurface.fm/stories/2023-4-25-community-archives/
Karagarga and the vulnerability of obscure films. (2015, July 3). National Post. https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/weekend-post/karagarga-and-the-vulnerability-of-obscure-films#
Knibbs, K. (2024, September 4). The Internet Archive loses its appeal of a major copyright case. Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/internet-archive-loses-hachette-books-case-appeal/
Meyers, N. (2013, January 11). Shadow libraries: The dilemma. Book Scouter. https://bookscouter.com/blog/shadow-libraries/
Schnieder, K.G. (2006, June 3). The user is not broken: A meme masquerading as a manifesto. Free Range Librarian. https://freerangelibrarian.com/2006/06/03/the-user-is-not-broken-a-meme-masquerading-as-a-manifesto/
University of Iowa Libraries. (n.d.). DIY history – about. Retrieved Februray 13, 2025 from https://diyhistory.lib.uiowa.edu/about-the-project
Wallace, K. (2020, May 15). Sharing stories: LA Covid-19 community archive. Los Angeles Public Library Blog. https://www.lapl.org/collections-resources/blogs/lapl/sharing-stories-safer-home-archive