Post- Digital Print - Monoskop

The resulting repositories and databases, covering a wide variety of
topics, could be made collectively searchable using simple (and free)
software, which periodically surveys and indexes the content of each
archive and makes it easily accessible through a dedicated search engine.
The result: independent ‘islands’ of archived culture, gradually
emerging and growing all across the Internet – all created by individuals
sharing a passion, wishing to share information, and contributing
to making accessible important content, currently unavailable on the
Web. In other words, a collective memory, in much the same way as
peer-to-peer networks have proven to be: combining the stability of
our ‘static’ printed culture with the ephemeral (and thus dynamic)
properties of digitisation.
Where institutions are characterised by a top-down approach
(which usually makes their various databases incompatible, and thus
difficult to integrate), the distributed archive follows a bottom-up
model. Casting aside the museum and its monument-oriented outlook,
a large number of culturally proactive individuals could all assume
responsibility for their ‘own’ bit of culture, before eventually passing
it on to another concerned party. Such an undertaking requires permanent
‘seeders’ (to return to the peer-to-peer parallel), individuals
responsible for keeping the content available at all times. ‘Seeding’, in
peer-to-peer terminology, means that in order to ‘own’ something, one
has to share it (and whether the actual content itself is made available,
or merely a reference to it, the mechanism remains much the same).
This of course is something entirely different from the whole ‘nostalgia’
industry. Building such archives of references, and digitising
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One of the many
different models of the
open-source project DIY
Book Scanner, 2010