Library Underground – A reading list for a coming community

Abstract

Written in the form of an informal conversation between Eva Weinmayr and her inner voice, this book chapter discusses practices of radical librarianship and underground dissemination. It touches on a set of examples reaching from the informal distribution strategies of the Whole Earth Catalog to the radical librarian movement in California in the 70s (Celeste West, Sanford Berman) to contemporary shadow librarianship (aaaaarg, Memory of the World, The Piracy Project). Concerns and questions about the original scope of public libraries to provide access to knowledge "for every member of the community" (ALA, Library Bill of Rights 1939) seem to crop up throughout the conversation: Who is a library for? What kind of materials and topics are missing, and how can we deal with the implicit biases in the organization and classification of knowledge?