Interview with Muriel Amar and Julien Hage

Muriel Amar, Julien Hage, you are participating, with eight other researchers and library professionals, in the research project À l’Ombre des bibliothèques : enquête sur les formes d’existence des bibliothèques en situation de fermeture sanitaire (In the Shadow of the Libraries: an investigation into the forms of existence of libraries in a situation of sanitary closure), carried out in the aftermath of the first confinement. Can you tell us a little about each of you?

MA: My first profession is library curator, I worked mainly at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Bibliothèque publique d’information; I contributed for nine years to the teaching mission of the Pôle Métiers du livre in Saint-Cloud (Paris Nanterre) as a professional; I am now a lecturer in Infocom at the Pôle Métiers du livre in Saint-Cloud, associated with the Dicen-IdF laboratory.

JH: I am a lecturer in Infocom, a researcher associated with Dicen-IdF, and director of the Infocom department of the Pôle Métiers du livre. I was a historian of the contemporary age, of the history of book and publishing, of the printed word in the digital age. I then taught courses about the book market courses and therefore considered editorialization, editorial devices in a slightly more professional and professionalizing way, integrating this approach and this focus in my research work.

Mars 2020, it’s confinement in France. What was your first reaction, both personally and as researchers, when you saw this new situation coming? What did you think about?

JH: The first thing we did was to keep the walls standing. We are director of studies. We had to hold the walls with the students, remotely, even though the walls had just come down, in a way. It hit us as we were in the middle of the semester, heading into the internships. The object we were looking at, The Solidarity Library of Confinement, was not the direct destination of our interest, all busy as we were with the pedagogical sauve qui peut. And only when we were able to glimpse, re-establish a link, more than any “continuity”, with the help of digital tools, did we become interested in what was happening on the Internet.

MA: At the time, I was still a library curator and I usually did public service at the Bpi every week. When the Bpi was closed during the lockdown, I found myself teleworking on my internal tasks, but I immediately signed up for a platform called Solidarité numérique, as a continuation of the public service I used to do, this telephone platform provides a contact and resources to help people complete their digital procedures. I felt like I was still doing my job as a librarian. It wasn’t something that was in my official work time. At no point did I think that there was such a thing as a self-managed collective like The Solidarity Library of Confinement.

Holding up the walls. All of a sudden, you discovered these new and developing, sharing libraries that were created on the Internet. How did you discover this research object, this Facebook group?

MA: The editorial committee of the Presses de l’Enssib, which includes the collection La Numérique, which I manage, asked me to do something about confinement and libraries. In the midst of everything that was being set up, in what was being undertaken by libraries, notably negotiations with publishers or online communication methods with users, I did not perceive what was specific to confinement. At first I wanted to work on Digital Solidarity, but as I thought about it, as I researched it, as I discussed it with others, I realized that this Facebook group, The Library in Solidarity with Confinement, and its study, could help us to develop a common reflection on libraries and confinement in a different way.

What was the first intuition of the research?

MA: I am interested in the forms of existence of the library, in, through and at the edge of public institutions. The idea at the beginning was to do work on informal alternatives set up by users. There were BSC, Zoom salons and other smaller initiatives. Little by little, we realized that all this was very structured, very inspiring, and very likely to be able to make a lot of different people work together. In this collection, this is something that interests me a lot: working and making people work together, with successes and failures, of course.

How does this group allow you to think about the library and its practices when it is open, what is missing and how users deprived of a physical presence can reappropriate common tools?

JH: What is very interesting in the genesis of BSC is what in it is library and what in it is not library. This is a bit beyond hybridization. The founders and administrators manage to constitute themselves as a library, to institutionalize themselves while avoiding quarrels. It is beyond a well-ordered community management, because they structure themselves around the idea that research is prevented but that it is necessary to exist, to continue to work, in this context of isolation and closure of resources. From this point of view, they make a library in the necessity that they have to find the documents and to exchange them. And in this sharing of documents, there is no dimension of disputes about the level of the books, the reference authors versus the more discreet ones. And that is very librarian! Another aspect that is and is not library is this way of “seeing knowledge”, to use the title of the book by Jean-François Bert and Jérôme Lamy. In this sense, BSC is a formidable “black box” of scientific practices and digital literacy. We have a view on very surprising scholarly practices. We can see how people function: through a documentary sharing that is gradually structured. First, people exchange photographs of physical libraries on social networks. And then they start to share digital resources that are more and more specific, more and more complex. It’s quite exciting because there’s a way to see science being done and to come and see science being done. There are those who make requests, there are those who respond to them and there are those who are at the spectacle of the requests. Of what is happening, of what is being read, of those who are working. And this is relatively unprecedented. It’s an exchange that usually takes place in a library room, “I’m looking for such and such a book to work on such and such a subject”, and here a Facebook group in which thousands of people look at each other, reproduces this exchange and makes it audible.

How did you research the group, with what permission and access, even reception, from its administrators?

MA: We contacted the administrators without knowing their number – there were up to 10 people involved. We presented them our project. They launched a survey to the whole community to allow the retrieval of data (by scrapping or API, our choice of tool was uncertain at the time) and to get in touch with members of the group for qualitative interviews, thus of quite long duration. The survey remained online for a week with more than 1500 votes that turned out to be very favorable to the project; some members wondered about the visibility that the book would give to this smart positioning of the group, which consists in connecting people without public file transfer. If there is a show, it is the backstage that needs to be imagined, to be restored, also in the aftermath, the post-confinement. Other groups, like AskAPDF, or pirate libraries, make the opposite choice to store files and are regularly chased away from the Web.

The book is composed of paths and texts that designate different uses, issues of the group. Which are the most striking?

JH: We can also see real evolutions, influenced by the practice of the group, in the digital know-how. An example I often cite is that of someone who posted a photo of his physical library and offered to scan some excerpts. This person, two years later, asks the members to recommend the best digital library management software, a new practice for him. This is a real transfer of know-how, a democratization and development of what I call “scholarly collecting” in the sense of Joëlle Le Marec, people who are going to build up libraries of hundreds of volumes that they had neither the use nor the interest for before this moment. For all that, there are all types of politics in BSC – in no particular order, hacker ideology, feminism, popular education… – but in the group, we function on a mode of implicit consensus that I called “Moral economy of science” in the manner of Lorraine Daston, that is to say that to work, we need documents, we need to exchange them, we need to have this mode of minimal mutual aid and this is what motivates a practice that is transgressive, which is never explicit, nor plebiscited, nor put into discourse. This practice of collective documentary brokerage on line is close to the networks of reciprocal exchanges of knowledge of popular education of the previous period. There is no debate in the group about an ethic at heart, the common goods of knowledge. There is very little of this kind of thing.

MA: Today, we go to BSC to make a documentary diagnosis from a subject, a request, an author and eventually, there is an exchange of files. There are lots of documentary interactions that are not finalized, questions without files, file proposals without receivers… It is not a black market of science, a plundering or an activism of the commons. It’s something much more pragmatic, a form of advocacy for the use value of the book.

JH: Indeed, there are a lot of orphaned requests. The group, despite its attempts, will never really be able to establish an index. And as one of the authors, Grégoire Clémencin, says in his text, “There is no memory of the group. The books that are most in demand are often classics, like Bourdieu’s The Distinction.

But if the group doesn’t have a memory, doesn’t your book offer one? It is distributed, also, digitally, and for free. Why did you distribute it like that?

MA: I’m glad you made the connection with the question of memory because that was one of the ideas: there has to be something left of this group, of these 70,000 members who said, “We’re going to do something together.” We want to keep traces of what is happening on digital spaces that are extremely labile, very fluctuating, very difficult to read, very difficult to understand. That’s the idea behind the Digital Collection. To try to propose a retention of phenomena, to stabilize them, to establish the state of practices and actors.

JH: It’s very surprising. We have, at the origin, a group of researchers, rather in doctorate or post-doctorate, in very pointed disciplines like anthropology, archaeology, history of the art and they really need a bibliography of reference of very pointed research; and in particular in foreign languages. One of the lessons learned from the work on the Library of Confinement is also to see a very concrete demand for an Anglo-Saxon bibliography that is not necessarily found in French research libraries and not necessarily in public reading libraries. There are demand effects that are materialized. And these actors, when the research libraries reopen, they will return and be a little less present in the center of gravity of the group’s activity. And these are people who were rather at the show, masterants, who were a little more discreet, who were watching, who then take over. And amateurs too.

We find this analysis in the book but also some testimonies…

MA: Yes, we want to give an account of this moment with, as it were, an ant’s eye view, and a 360 degree perspective of the subject. It is a very polyphonic work, distributed in courses which are as many glances and different ways. There are analyses (conducted with different approaches) but also stories written by the members themselves. We contacted a lot of people. Not all of them followed up. We conducted in-depth interviews with about ten members who were the subject of portraits. And texts written during the confinement, such as those of Joëlle Le Marec, Charles Parisot-Sillon, Dan Sperber. Finally, there is the whole methodological part, the constitution of a data base which is the result of the scrapping of the Facebook group, that Grégoire Clémencin made, which allowed a textual and statistical treatment. This is working on a Web object, on library questions and on an unprecedented moment in history, in a dialogue between researchers and professionals.

JH: And by giving a voice to the actors, by restoring it without being in a form of overhang or blissful positivism.

What is the future of the book today? You present it at conferences, meetings, in libraries. It’s interesting, as far as a digital book goes. Also, have you distributed it on the BSC group?

MA: We stayed in close contact anyway with the administrators throughout the work. They were the first to be informed about the release and they are invited to all our interventions. For the moment, they have never come.

JH: Or have they done so discreetly? As discreetly as they act online. It’s a real paradox: Why Facebook? Robust device, platform of the ordinary, of lost time, of regained time, of breaking isolation. Why have an approach of this style by placing it on Facebook? Maybe because this network is called The Face and the Book.

MA: (laughs). That’s true. Our book is on Open Edition Books. It’s a way to be fully in line with our object. It’s a real question of free and its value.

JH: The world of tomorrow is about thinking about what happened to us at the time of confinement. As we chant the words of continuity. When one is responsible for an educational and pedagogical, scientific and collective load, one sees well the effects of the confinement. This gratuitousness also says that we must cross over, go beyond the society that says that we must continue, that we must be productive. And that, in my opinion, also goes against many dominant speeches. BSC shows in actions that knowledge is a viaticum, that research is nourished by exchanges, that science is an inexhaustible source of curiosity. Even in the darkest days of the pandemic, in the face of the austerity policies of the academic world. This book is first and foremost part of that reflection. It was conceived as such because we played with confinements.

What was your working method for this project?

MA: We worked collectively and yet the collective was also instantiated at a distance. It was totally unprecedented. We met for a year, almost every Friday night, online. It was quite difficult because it created constraints for us. Vienna who wants, comes who can, the appointment existed. The online construction of a collective project is an extremely difficult exercise because each word, each word weighs a lot. The informality is lost. The work was also in itself a research experience. Having experienced all of this, personally and professionally, is extremely important for understanding what we have to do next.

JH: All the authors met after the book was finished! At the lifting of the health devices. And I think that it is finally the fact of having written, of having worked like that which brought the possibility of an abyss in our respective courses. In my teaching practice, it makes me think a lot more now. I understand better how my students function in their relationship to the bibliography. What also impressed us about this project was that the administrators of the group understood very quickly that this confinement would last.

MA: As of March 14, 2020, we didn’t know that we would be in for two months. Or two years, actually… That’s right…

Thank you for this interview and for this work that we encourage everyone to consult, for this period during which many of us were looking for our marks, to find new ones in our relationship to books, to study and to documentation, to the prevented relationship to the other above all.