OwA Website to be included in Tamiment Library Web Archive

Occupy with Art has been contacted by Tamiment Library for the purposes of inducting the site into Tamiment's Web Archive. OwA is excited about the prospect, and we will keep you updated on the progress of our discussion with TL. YOUR FEEDBACK IS WELCOME AND ENCOURAGED.

[EXCERPTS FROM THE CONTACT EMAIL]:

Hello,

 

The Tamiment Library, New York University (a special collection documenting labor and progressive social activity) has identified your website, Occupy with Art, http://www.occupywithart.com, as a vital publication for current and future researchers.  I am an archivist working on the Economic and Social Justice web archive, which contains websites of entities concerned with promoting economic and social justice in the United States. A specific area of concentration is the Occupy Wall Street Movement that began in September, 2011.

 

Materials in this archive are strictly for educational and scholarly research purposes. 

...

The archiving tools we use are provided by the California Digital Library (CDL), which is part of the University of California.  These tools were initially funded by the Library of Congress in an effort to preserve our digital cultural heritage.

 

...

 

We hope you will agree that your site is an extremely valuable part of the historic record.  These materials will serve as a resource of lasting value for researchers, and the archive may well be of use to your own organization in the event that you should need to easily review older information.

[ABOUT TAMIMENT LIBRARY]

History & Description

The Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University form a unique, internationally-known center for scholarly research on Labor and the Left. The primary focus is the complex relationship between trade unionism and progressive politics and how this evolved over time. Archival, print, photograph, film, and oral history collections describe the history of the labor movement and how it related to the broader struggle for economic, social, and political change.

In 1977 the Robert F. Wagner Archives was established as a joint program of the New York City Central Labor Council and the Tamiment Library. The Wagner is the designated repository for the records of the Council's more than 200 member unions. Today the Library has an extraordinary research collection documenting the history of organized labor in New York and the workers who built the City.

Tamiment has one of the finest research collections in the country documenting the history of radical politics: socialism, communism, anarchism, utopian experiments, the cultural left, the New Left, and the struggle for civil rights and civil liberties. It is the repository for the Archives of Irish America, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, and a growing Asian American labor collection.

Read more about the history of the Tamiment Library.

Collection Development Policy

Tamiment's archival collections, manuscripts, oral histories, photographs, films, videotapes, books, serials, and pamphlets document the history of labor, socialism, communism, anarchism, utopian experiments, the New Left, and the post-New Left as well as the social and cultural contexts in which these movements functioned.

Full Collection Development Policy Statement

DRAFT Prelude & Instructions for the Anarchives for #S17

[From Jez]

Comments & criticisms are absolutely necessary. But you can expect something like this to be distributed along with the signs on S15 in Washington Sq & S16 in Foley Sq. Negesti is my main coordinator in NYC right now, but contact me if interested in helping. We need movers and photographers!

                 [DRAFT]

+++++++

                 PRELUDE

In the first days of the Occupation of Liberty Plaza, amidst all of the pragmatic bustle and idealistic anxiety, a small group of radical archivists began to assemble a small collection of the community's signs.  Each sign's anonymous composition showed distinction, each one clever, eccentric, and beautiful in its own right. And when assembled together, the many signs' messages beamed a light in the darkest nights of NY's Financial District, a beacon, a light, one bright enough to outshine even the Eye of Sauron.

And the People came, from all around the city, surrounding states, other nations; they came to Occupy Wall Street. And so the community grew. And as the community grew, so did the Archivists' collection. And as the Occupiers grew proud of their occupation, so did the archivists of their collection. And everyone was so content and busy with all this growth that nobody stopped to ask: what are these signs, what do they mean to us, why are they important...and most obvious of all, what should we do with them?

In the days after the Raid, when we'd lost our place to live, and after the money had begun to dry up, though it had mostly caused trouble anyway, these questions were still unanswered and the Archivists were getting restless. In particular, one that was more radical than most began to suggest wild ideas of returning the Archives to the People, creating a revolutionary archive, a decentralized network of individuals, places, and things, that would be documented by the movement in-itself and for-itself.  While the Archivists either ignored this unfamiliar idea or tried to distance themselves from the archivist, his idea had begun to travel around the movement, and has come to be recognized under a distinct name: they called it the Anarchives.

The Archivists could neither understand the project's logic nor tolerate it's seeming uncertainty, but they also could not suggest a solution for maintaining the non-institutional OWS Archives as the group had originally planned. So instead, the Archivists made plans to give away the collection to the Tamiment, a traditional, institutional archive where the signs would be guarded and documented by experts. And despite these plans to ultimately surrender the archives to NYU, they demanded first and foremost that the radical archivist surrender his collection to them.

But the rogue archivist couldn't stand to see his work perverted and ideas rejected out of hand. So the archivist - now, declared, an Anarchivist! - stole away with his portion of the signs, vowing to return them to their rightful owners. But with no names to go on, and no one to claim to own them, the only rightful holder seemed to be the OWS community itself.  Believing it fitter to lose them among the community of their creators, rather than to stow them away safely for a thousand years in a private tower in Greenwich Village, he stowed the signs in a locker. On the birthday of the movement, he would give them back to the People and let them decide what to do. So the Anarchivist, having abandoned his property to the Commons, leaves the signs to you this day along with the following note:

            INSTRUCTIONS
                     3
            Anarchivists' Challenge

1. Take these signs. Take one or a few, or as many as you think you can personally care for and keep them safe. But DON'T keep them to yourself! 
2. Record yr history of the sign, yr thoughts and experiences and share them with others. Call together events to discuss the experiences and ideas that these signs represent. Be engaged in history, even as you write it.
3. Come together again around the movement's birthday, wherever you are and with however many you can assemble, and prepare to give them away again. These signs belong to all of us, as all of us are their archivists; so we are Anarchivists and so we pledge our dedication.

With all hope in lost causes,
The Anarchivist(s?)
-----

Interested participants are invited to come to Washington Sq on Sept 15 and Foley Square on September 16, 2012, where the Anarchives will be distributed.

We request you join one (or more) of the following start-up communities:
1. An email listserv
2. The OWS Anarchives Facebook group
3. A wiki.occupy.net account

Indicate yr preference and we'll set you up as necessary. We invite you to develop community events using your gifts. You are our historical astronauts. We invite you to imagine & urge you to create the meaning of what the history of this movementous event has been.

Update on Friday, September 14, 2012 at 04:28PM by admin

Would you like to help write the history of Occupy Wall Street? The OWS Anarchives is offering original signs from Liberty Plaza to activist historians & archivists interested in documenting the movement through artifacts of OWS history!

INSTRUCTIONS

Participants are requested to come at 12 pm Noon to Washington Sq on Sept 15 and Foley Square on September 16, 2012, where the Anarchives will be distributed.  In return, we will take yr contact information and invite you to join one of the following start-up communities:

1. The OWS Anarchives Hub @Interoccupy.net
2. The OWS Anarchives Facebook group 
3. A wiki.occupy.net account

Indicate yr preference and we'll set you up as necessary. We invite you to develop community events using your gifts. You are our historical astronauts. We invite you to imagine & urge you to create the meaning of what the history of this movementous event has been.

-----
If you have any questions, plz let me know. & Plz FWD: as interested or necessary!

LOW LIVES: OCCUPY! Videos Live at the New Low Lives Website

To view the video documentation of Low Lives: Occupy! click the image.

OWS Space Team Presents: Valentine's Day @Hyperallergic

Occupy Wall Street: Wall Street is ALL (!) Streets from SpontaneousAutonomousCreativity on Vimeo.

Tuesday, Feb 14 @ 7 pm, Hyperallergic in Brooklyn 

An Occupy Love Screening: OWS Arts & Culture's First Encounters with Wall Street

Occupy Wall Street Arts & Culture's first activities on Wall Street focused on rhetorical poetry were a confrontation -- not unlike the Situationist art of Guy Debord and the Situationist International, prominent artists of the May 1968 events in France.  These situations were aimed to provoke a memee with society about Wall Street on Wall Street, the now zombified public forum.  Jez Bold will offer a public memee session with members of the original team of Occupy Wall Street Arts & Culture, who helped plan and perform a campaign of direct aesthetic actions on Wall Street, performances that attempted to set the stage of Wall Street before September 17, 2011 and the beginning of the occupation.

Hyperallergic

181 N 11th St, Suite 302, Brooklyn, NY 11211

OWS Archives Forum: What should an archive of Occupy Wall Street look like?

@ Judson Memorial Assembly Hall
Sunday Feb 5, 5-7pm

On its surface, it appears to be an impossible task: to document the activities of a major social movement as it is happening. And yet this has been the monumental task undertaken by the Occupy Wall Street Archives Working Group (OWS Archives WG), a collection of archivally-interested individuals who have established a sizeable collection of signs, flyers, interviews, oral histories, and artifacts ever since the infancy the occupation at Liberty Plaza (formerly known as Zuccotti Park). And, as you might expect, the OWS Archives working group have encountered this important question of the ultimate vision for an archive of Occupy Wall Street.

The OWS Archives Working Group is seeking input from people throughout the Occupy movement and the broader community of archivists & collectors on how to move forward with the management of the OWS Archives. In a public forum at Judson Memorial Assembly Hall , we intend to offer a presentation on the status of the Archives of Occupy Wall Street and host a discussion on visions for the future of the collection. We highly encourage anyone with an interest in archives and the developing history of the Occupy movement to attend for an exciting and urgent discussion.

Please RSVP to archive@nycga.net