Census Instructions

Deaccession is a multimedia project to explore the uncatalogued books at Princeton—the decorative, the discarded, the suppressed, the forgotten—as they make an underground map of the university’s disciplines and the spaces between and beyond them.

WE SEEK THE HELP OF ALL MEMBERS OF THE UNIVERSITY AND WIDER COMMUNITY FOR AN UNOFFICIAL VISUO-ESSAYISTIC CROWD-SOURCED CENSUS OF ABANDONED BOOKS.

Every book in the Princeton University Catalog has a call number and a place in perpetuity. But there is a vast, uncatalogued collection dispersed across campus, in the hands of departments, programs, individuals, or simply on shelves in buildings. Books migrate from spaces of use to spaces of display or neglect. We want to know: Which books? When, if we can tell? Where do they end up—in what closets, or corridors, or lounges, with what traffic past them? What are they doing there—what functions do they lose, what functions do they gain? Do they travel outside the university’s property—if so, where? What stories do they tell, individually or in aggregate—of historical change, of political winds, of obsolescence, of fashion, of the rise and fall and transformation of the disciplines?

Deaccession invites all members of the Princeton community to participate in this census. Our basic tool is the camera: we want photographs of books in sites of deaccession. Images where titles are visible are most useful; images of single books of special interest are welcome, and/or images of the place where you found them. Specific locations are important: building name, room number. And we invite comment: what do you see, when you look at these books that are no longer meant to be looked at, or only looked at? What do they have to tell about the entity—be it person or department or program or field—that no longer wants them, or wants them, but differently now? Anything from a few words to a short essay. Submissions made to this form will be entered onto a publicly accessible google map that will situate these dispersed holdings across the campus, to make a photonegative of the library catalog, a snapshot of forgetting in the site of long knowledge.