Galleries, Libraries, Archives, & Museums

I have avoided BDs up until now because I boycott Sony. I grabbed a blu-ray player dirt cheap on the 2nd-hand market b/c it was missing parts. I scrounged the needed parts so now I can watch BDs.

I obviously will not be buying an BDs since I boycott Sony. But what happens when I borrow a BD from a public library? Has Sony already been fully compensated by the time the disc goes on the shelf? Or does Sony get compensated somehow on a per-borrow basis?

Media access will be dropped from public libraries. Some politician decided that everyone has Internet with streaming subscriptions.

Or they figured it’s okay to marginalise those who do not. They assumed no one has a problem with patronising shitty surveillance capitalists like Netflix and Amazon.

IIUC, the only possible ways to watch movies in Belgium without feeding corporate databases is:

• buying CDs/DVDs with cash
• theaters (cash paid tickets)
• the high seas (☠)
• broadcast TV (does that exist in Brussels? My hand-held dvb-t player finds no signals to tune)

Only two of those options serves the poor. One is illegal and the other is content-constrained. And still out of reach for anyone who can’t afford Internet at home.

UPDATE

When Médiathéque closes, it does not mean the media goes away. Some libraries will continue with media by managing themselves without the Médiathéque parent.

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/37371338

The question can be broken into two parts:

1. would people use it?
2. is it appropriate for a library to have a media room?

I have no TV and I suspect with so many people subscribing to streaming services lately as their sole source (from surveillance capitalists), probably not many people even have antennas to pick up local broadcast TV anymore. Is that a safe assumption?

A couple years ago I setup a MythTV for someone. Their local broadcasts were completely different from what I recall from decades past-- mostly educational (documentaries and how-to shows) and mostly commercial-free. It seemed to be largely fed by tax-funded public broadcast service. It used to be rife with commercials but commercial interests seem to have abandoned it.

Where I live now, I am offline and also lack equipment to see what’s broadcast locally. Not sure it’s justified to buy gear just to see what there is. And I have never seen what free satellite signals are like anywhere.

On the one hand, I could see it turning into an entertainment/cinema type of space with people bringing in popcorn.. which is perhaps a deviation from the library’s purpose. OTOH, it could be information focused to give access to locally aired educational broadcasts and to (perhaps more importantly) show people what content exists locally and to experience MythTV. Library users could even schedule shows to be recorded for them (as the library is not open 24/7). The MythTV PCs would of course be running Linux, which would be a covert way to promote the escape from proprietary OSs.

As I ask myself whether this is all crazy talk, a local library has Arduinos for people to experiment with.. which has nothing to do with books or media.

A parallel mission could be to get the library to run an Invideous instance to try to liberate people from Google’s stranglehold and their ads. Google would probably block the library’s instance but the blockade would then serve to inform people about Google’s politics. I guess the question is whether Invidious is too much in the legal gray area for libraries to seriously consider.

We are living through a period of profound uncertainty and systemic challenge—where erasure of truth and history is not only possible, but actively underway.

As a librarian, I bear witness not only to the crisis but to the opportunity: History is protected by those who collect, preserve, and share the facts, and the archive becomes a battleground where every saved photograph, flyer, email, playlist, program, and story is an act of resistance.

The ‘epidemic for Golden Age paintings’ may already be a global problem, with the fungi a possible health hazard