I have received a request from a colleague in Denmark about some innovative research they are doing. The research project is described below. Jonna Holmgaard Larsen has asked that if anyone has any experience or engagement with what they are doing, it would be very helpful if you could get in touch. The email address is [log in to unmask]
Chris Batt
Literature taking place
Literature taking place is a new project by Aarhus and Roskilde Libraries in collaboration with Litteratursiden.dk. The focus of the project is to investigate the new areas of literature in the expanded field and to create new ways of communicating them within the library.
Literature today is increasingly taking place outside the book. We experience it on stage, receive it on our mobile, follow it on Facebook, download it or pass it on the street. Literature in the expanded field is growing, spreading to various platforms and taking different shapes.
The media itself is not the message, but the way the media interacts with the content creates new challenges for the modern librarian. How do we put the SMS novel on the shelf? How do we register interactive electronic literature and street art in the catalogue? And how do we keep track of the jungle of small press publishers who publish literature on post-its[1] and medicine cabinets[2]?
Aarhus Public Libraries, Libraries in Roskilde and Litteratursiden.dk is collaborating, with financial support from the Danish Agency for Libraries and Media, on a two-year project, called Literature taking place – communication of interactive and performative literature. The purpose of the project is to include literature from the expanded field into the communication of fiction literature in the libraries. By focusing on two important tendencies, digital literature and performative literature, and by experimenting with different kinds of events and new communicative forms, we expect to achieve insight and experience within the field and hereby be able to design some guidelines and understandings on how to incorporate the new areas of literature into the libraries. We will complete the project with a conference on the topic in ultimo 2012.
[1] http://www.saxo.com/dk/item/post-it.aspx
[2] http://mortensondergaard.net/Apotek.html
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