About

salvaged.work began with making the winning bid for the catalogue raisonné of the Danish painter Asger Jorn and the subsequent action to digitize the catalogue, which had long been out of print. Further research into Jorn’s œuvre revealed many works that had been published in limited number and had since become scarce. salvaged.work’s first idea was to digitize and rescue these rare works from the confines of their physical copies and share them with a new online audience, but has since expanded to include other works that are similarly being salvaged, usually from restrictive sources.

The case for salvaging

Libraries, archives, museums, and collectors reinforce the artificial scarcity of a published work when they limit means of access. When a work is accessible through reading room use only, the experience requires a physical presence. In a modern digital-first society where the need for physicality is declining, institutions need to embrace this change and digitize their collections. These efforts are slowed by copyright restrictions and the sheer volume of published works to be digitized that have never been released beyond analogue form, leading to the need for intervention.

The voluntary dedication of citizen archivists to bring these works to the internet is invaluable. The permanence of a digitized work transcends the decay of paper, the warping of vinyl, and the ruin of institutions.

salvaged.work uses the Internet Archive as the digital repository for these works, so that they may hopefully exist even if this archive has disappeared.

The grind of the scanner as it peels language off the page, thawing it, liberating it.

- Kenneth Goldsmith, Theory, 2015

About the archive

The collection has no fixed subject. Condition is what binds the works: work published in small numbers, surviving in few copies, sitting in private hands or a single library shelf, usually never previously readable anywhere but the physical original. Some of it is postwar European art history; some of it is much older; what qualifies a piece for inclusion is scarcity. As the archive grows, the range of what it covers is expected to widen rather than settle.

Most items receive two treatments - an article documents the work in the manner of an encyclopedia entry, with sources cited. Where the full text has been digitised, the Reading Room holds a complete reading edition, in the original language and in English.

Editorial method

Every text in the Reading Room passes through a human-in-the-loop digitisation pipeline:

Scanning. Works are scanned page by page from physical copies, or are sourced from the Internet where a physical copy is not available. The scans themselves are deposited at the Internet Archive.

Transcription. The text is transcribed from the scans using optical character recognition with machine assistance. Transcription preserves the original exactly as printed including archaic spelling and inconsistent names. Where possible, printed page numbers are carried into the text so that any passage can be cited against the physical original.

Translation. Where a work is not in English, a full English reading edition is prepared with machine assistance under a fixed, book-specific translation protocol. The protocol defines how names, offices, currencies of the period, etc. are rendered, what stays untranslated, and how the original’s register is kept. The translation adds nothing and leaves nothing out.

Verification. A separate automated pass checks the finished translation against the source for omissions, additions, and drifted figures, and a person reviews its findings against the scans. Structural checks confirm footnotes, headings, and page markers.

Review. A person reviews and approves as much as possible before it appears here.

Background images

The backgrounds of this site rotate through various lithographs of Asger Jorn’s Cobra Bibliotek portfolio, one of the works documented in the archive.