Digital libraries

Also electronic libraries, online libraries.

Arts, humanities and social sciences

Libraries

• 

  Marxists Internet Archive

• 

  Les Classiques des sciences sociales

• 

  Social Science Research Network

• 

  Electronic Poetry Center

• 

  UbuWeb

• 

  Textz.com

• 

  Aaaaarg

• 

  Monoskop

• 

  The Anarchist Library

• 

  Memory of the World

• 

  Library Stack

• 

  Uberty

• Marxists Internet Archive, est. 1990 by Zodiac, online since 1993; hosts the works of Marxist, communist, socialist, and anarchist writers. URL. Facebook.
• Les Classiques des sciences sociales, est. 1993 by Jean-Marie Tremblay. Hosts Francophone works in social and human sciences; 6000 publications from 2000 authors. Maintained by the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi (UQAC). URL.
• Social Science Research Network (SSRN), est. 1994 by Michael Jensen and Wayne Marr. The core of the collection are preprint versions of academic papers in PDF submitted by authors. Now run by Social Science Electronic Publishing, Inc. (SSEP). URL.
• Electronic Poetry Center, est. 1994 by Loss Pequeño Glazier and Charles Bernstein at SUNY Buffalo. Hosts poetry books and periodicals; also lists contents from Eclipse & Jacket 2 Reissues. URL.
• UbuWeb, est. 1996 by Kenneth Goldsmith as a resource for visual, concrete and sound poetry, soon expanded to include historical materials related more broadly to the avant-garde arts. URL. Twitter.
• Textz.com, est. 2001 by Sebastian Lütgert/ROLUX; hosted theory and fiction in plain text. URL (archived version).
• Aaaaarg, est. c2004 by Sean Dockray in the framework of the Public School, originally focused on critical theory, later expanded to include art and humanities as such. URL. Twitter. Facebook.
• Monoskop, est. August 2004 by Dušan Barok as a research initiative for documentation of media art, later expanded to the arts, media and humanities. Monoskop Log has branched out in 2009. URL. Twitter. Facebook.
• The Anarchist Library, est. c2008, an archive focusing on anarchism. The site provides an online service, Bookbuilder, to create collections of texts, with editing features, changing layout and rendering to PDFs or EPUBs. URL.
• Memory of the World library, started 2012 by Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak as a proof of concept of the Public Library initiative. URL. Facebook.
• Uberty, est. 2015 as a resource of documents and media related to New Rationalism, Accelerationism, and other recent theory and philosophy. URL. Twitter. Facebook.
• Library Stack, est. 2015 by Erik Wysocan and Benjamin Tiven. Database initiative for digital objects and publications. URL. Twitter.

See also

• Digital libraries hosting avant-garde periodicals, listed in our Magazines section
• Digital libraries for the Classics
• Modern Philosophy Source
• Post-Reformation Digital Library
• "More resources" section on Monoskop Log
• Initiatives featured on the Memory of the World website

Conferences, workshops, exhibitions

• Libraries, Access to Knowledge, and Self-Learning: From the Library of Alexandria to aaaaarg.org panel at MobilityShifts summit, New York, Oct 2011. [1]
• Public Library events, since Dec 2011.
• HAIP 2012: Public Library / Javna knjižnica conference and exhibition, Kiberpipa, Ljubljana, 28-30 Nov 2012. Video.
• An Archive/Live Archive/UnArchive and Public Library workshop, kuda and CK13 Youth Center, Novi Sad, 15-16 Jul 2013. Video.
• Hack the biblio! Construir bibliotecas publicas, Calafou, Barcelona, 17-21 Apr 2014.
• Underground E-publishing session within Off the Press: Electronic Publishing in the Arts conference, WORM, Rotterdam, 23 May 2014. [2] Video: [3] [4] [5] [6].
• Public Library: Rethinking the Infrastructures of Knowledge Production conference and exhibition, Württembergsicher Kunstverein (WKV) & Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, 30 Oct-23 Nov 2014. Video.
• Javna knjižnica / Public Library conference and exhibition, Nova Gallery, Zagreb, May-Jun 2015. [7] [8] [9]
• Ideographies of Knowledge symposium, Mundaneum, Mons, 3 Oct 2015.
• Custodians.online – The Struggle over the Future of ›Pirate‹ Libraries and Universal Access to Knowledge discussion, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, 19 Feb 2016. [10]
• Radical Piratical symposium, University of Malmö, 2-3 May 2016.
• Knowledge Architectures talks and workshops, Tata Institute for Social Sciences, Mumbai, 2-6 Jul 2016.
• Pravo na stanovanje, pravo na obrazovanje – javne borbe i javna knjižnica, Omladinski centar CK13 & Galerija SULUV, Novi Sad, 4-12 May 2017. Catalogue.
• "Caring for the Open: Custodianship, Accessibility" panel discussion at GfM-Jahrestagung 2017: Zugänge, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, 5 Oct 2017.

Interventions and research

• AAAARG Library, a site-specific installation, in conjunction with the the fifth annual NY Art Book Fair, Fall 2010.
• The Piracy Project by AND Publishing and Andrea Francke, 2011-14. [11] [12]
• Giving What You Don't Have, an artistic research project by Cornelia Sollfrank, since 2012.

Scanning

• DIY Book Scanner, a community of people who build their own book scanners.
• Linear Book Scanner, a low-cost open-source page-turning book scanner. Initiated by Dany Qumsiyeh.
• Tomislav Medak, Dubravka Sekulic, with An Mertens, Book Scanning & Post-Processing Manual Based on Public Library Overhead Scanner, Zagreb: Public Library & Multimedia Institute, [Dec 2014], 22 pp.

General interest

Libraries

Public domain, Creative Commons and Open Access texts

• Project Gutenberg, est. 1971 by Michael Hart, has over 46k books in plain text, subsequently also converted to other formats. Hosted by ibiblio at U North Carolina, Chapel Hill. (multiple languages)
• Perseus Digital Library, est. c1987 by Gregory R. Crane, covers the history, literature and culture of the Greco-Roman world. The collection contains editions and modern English translations of hundreds of ancient Greek, Roman, Arabic, Germanic and other texts. Maintained by the Department of the Classics, Tufts U.
• arXiv, est. 1991 by Paul Ginsparg. Has over 1M e-prints in physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance and statistics in PDF and other formats (TeX, DVI, PostScript or HTML). Maintained by Cornell U. (English)
• Project Runeberg, est. 1992 by Lars Aronsson. Contains works significant to the culture and history of the Nordic countries; as images and HTML text. Hosted by Lysator, an academic computer group at Linköping University. (multiple languages)
• Liber Liber, est. 1994 by Marco Calvo, Gino Roncaglia, Paolo Barberi, Fabio Ciotti and Marco Zela. (Italian)
• Internet Archive, est. 1996 by Brewster Kahle. The section 'eBooks and Texts' contains almost 8M scanned texts as high-resolution images, subsequently also converted to other formats. (multiple languages)
• Wikisource, a Wikimedia project started 2003. Contains around 500k texts in wiki form. (multiple languages)
• HathiTrust, est. 2008. A partnership of 100+ research institutions and libraries. Also includes content digitised by Internet Archive digitisation initiatives and Google Books. Access to copyrighted works requires an institutional subscription. (multiple languages)

Autonomous/independent libraries

• Lib.Ru, RuNet's early web library, est. 1994 by Maksim Moshkov.
• Publichnaya biblioteka, est. 1998 by Vadim Ershov.
• Library.nu, formerly Ebooksclub and Gigapedia, closed down in Feb 2012.
• Library Genesis (LibGen), est. March 2008, has multiple interfaces, mirrors and versions [13] [14] [15].
• Sci-Hub, est. September 2011 by Alexandra Elbakyan.
• Bibliotik, a torrent site for e-books.
• Open Library, an e-book lending library, operated by the Internet Archive.

See also

• Listings on Filesharingtalk.com

National libraries

• Belgium, Belgica
• Brazil, BNDigital
• Chile, BND
• Croatia, NSK
• Czech Republic, NDK national library, CAS academy of sciences, DLIB CAS academic journals, UCL CAS literary periodicals
• Denmark, KB national library, DEFF electronic research library
• Finland, DIGI, KDK
• France, Gallica BnF national library, Persée humanities journals
• Germany, DDB, Digi20
• Hungary, MEK, Hungaricana
• Iceland, Timarit periodicals
• Italy, IMSS history of science, more
• Japan, NDLDC
• Macedonia, DLIB.mk
• Netherlands, KB, DBNL
• Norway, NB
• Poland, Polona national library, FBC digital libraries federation
• Portugal, BND
• Qatar, QDL
• Romania, DigiBuc, (old version)
• Russia, RSL state library, NLR national library, GLIB state historical library, FEB literature and folklore
• Serbia, DNBS national library, SCIndeks journals
• Slovakia, Dikda
• Slovenia, dLib.si
• Spain, BNE
• Sweden, KB national library, SVAR national archives
• Ukraine, NAES, Diasporiana
• United Kingdom, BL

Commercial libraries hosting academic journals

• John Benjamins, 70 journals.
• JStor, est. 1995 by William G. Bowen (Princeton U); now owned by ITHAKA; 1900 journals.
• MIT Press Journals, 32 journals.
• Proquest Central.
• Project Muse, est. 1995, operated by Johns Hopkins University Press; focus on digital humanities and social science; 630 journals.
• SAGE Journals, 750 journals.
• ScienceDirect, operated by Elsevier, Amsterdam, 2500 journals.
• Springer Link, 2900 journals.
• Taylor & Francis Online
• Wiley Online Library, 1500 journals.

See also

• Wikipedia list of commercial digital libraries

See also

• List of digital libraries on PRDL
• Digital libraries used in bibliographies on Monoskop

Literature

Essays, talks, statements, interviews

• Aaron Swartz, "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto", Jul 2008.
  • translations
• Sean Dockray, "The Scan and the Export", Fillip 12: "Critical Forms of Publicness", Fall 2010, pp 98-110. [16] A short meditation on book scanning and document exporting. Discusses machines, the people who use them, and the contrasting forms of publicity and collectivity emerging from these technical configurations.
• Kenneth Goldsmith, "UbuWeb at 15 Years: An Overview", Poetry Foundation, 26 Apr 2011.
• Matthew Fuller, "In the Paradise of Too Many Books: An Interview with Sean Dockray", Mute, London, 4 May 2011.
• Kenneth Goldsmith, "Paradise Now: UbuWeb's World Without Copyright", 17 Mar 2012. Keynote speech given at Matadero Madrid. (English), (Spanish)
• Lawrence Liang, "Shadow Libraries", e-flux 37 (Sep 2012). On the library as heterotopia.
• Alessandro Ludovico, "Marcell Mars, Interview", Neural 44: "Post-Digital Print", Bari, Jan 2013, pp 6-8. (English)
• Alessandro Ludovico, "Dušan Barok, Interview", Neural 44: "Post-Digital Print", Bari, Jan 2013, pp 10-11. (English)
• Sean Dockray, "Openings and Closings", in Contestations: Learning From Critical Experiments in Education, eds. Tim Ivison and Tom Vandeputte, Bedford Press, 2013. On open access and education.
• Sean Dockray, "Interface, Access, Loss", Discipline magazine lecture, 2013. Revised version of a chapter in Undoing Property, eds. Marysia Lewandowska and Laurel Ptak, Sternberg Press, 2013. A critique of the cloud.
• Cornelia Sollfrank, Giving What You Don't Have, video interviews with Femke Snelting, Marcell Mars, Kenneth Goldsmith, Eva Weinmayr & Andrea Francke, Sean Dockray, Dmytri Kleiner, 2013. Includes transcripts. (English)
• Dušan Barok, "Techniques of Publishing", Information Between Commodity and Community seminar, Prague, May 2014. On the reciprocity between electronic publishing and scholarly research today.
• Dušan Barok, "Communing Texts", Off the Press conference, WORM, Rotterdam, May 2014. On the relevance of plain text in publishing; a proposal for discursive entanglement of scholarly references and hyperlinks.
• Marcell Mars, Manar Zarroug, Tomislav Medak, "Public Library (An Essay)", Memory of the World blog, 27 Oct 2014; printed in Javna knjižnica / Public Library, eds. Tomislav Medak, Marcell Mars, and WHW, Zagreb: WHW & Multimedia Institute, 2015, pp 75-85. On the idea of public library.
  • "Javna knjižnica (Esej)", trans. Una Bauer, in Javna knjižnica / Public Library, eds. Tomislav Medak, Marcell Mars, and WHW, Zagreb: WHW & Multimedia Institute, 2015, pp 7-17. (Croatian)
• Marcell Mars, "Why and How to Be(come) an Amateur Librarian", Memory of the World blog, 28 Oct 2014.
• Dušan Barok, "Poetics of Research", Public Library conference, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, Nov 2014. On the cultural algorithms historically conditioned by scholarly research and publishing.
• Davide Giorgetta and Valerio Nicoletti's interviews with Geert Lovink, Janneke Adema, Henry Warwick, 2015.
• McKenzie Wark, "Metadata Punk", in Javna knjižnica / Public Library, eds. Tomislav Medak, Marcell Mars, and WHW, Zagreb: WHW & Multimedia Institute, 2015, pp 111-117.
  • "Metapodatkovni punk", trans. Dušanka Profeta, in Javna knjižnica / Public Library, eds. Tomislav Medak, Marcell Mars, and WHW, Zagreb: WHW & Multimedia Institute, 2015, pp 41-47. [17] (Croatian)
• Tomislav Medak, "The Future After the Library. UbuWeb and Monoskop's Radical Gestures", in Javna knjižnica / Public Library, eds. Tomislav Medak, Marcell Mars, and WHW, Zagreb: WHW & Multimedia Institute, 2015, pp 121-137.
  • "Budućnosti iz knjižnice. Radikalne geste UbuWeba i Monoskopa", in Javna knjižnica / Public Library, eds. Tomislav Medak, Marcell Mars, and WHW, Zagreb: WHW & Multimedia Institute, 2015, pp 51-66. [18] (Croatian)
• Dušan Barok, "More Than Numbers, Less Than Words", Javna knjižnica / Public Library conference, Nova Gallery, Zagreb, Jun 2015.
• Sean Dockray, Lawrence Liang, "Sharing Instinct: An Annotation of the Social Contract Through Shadow Libraries", e-flux journal 56th Venice Biennale, 14 Aug 2015. Response: Mohammad Salemy. (English)
• "In solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub", 30 Nov 2015. Open letter. (English)
  • translations.
• Tomislav Medak, "All Forms of Shadow Knowledge Exist in the Fault Lines of Officially Sanctioned Knowledge. An Interview", Balcan Contemporary, 18 Dec 2015. (English)
• Tomislav Medak, "Death and Survival of Dead Labor", Schloss Post 2: "Authorship", Stuttgart: Akademie Schloss Solitude, 8 Jan 2016. (English)
• Dennis Yi Tenen, "Preliminary Thoughts on the Way to the Free Library Congress", Schloss Post 2: "Authorship", Stuttgart: Akademie Schloss Solitude, 24 Mar 2016. (English)
• Balázs Bodó, "In the Name of Humanity", Limn 6 (2016). (English)
• Alexandra Elbakyan, "Why Science is Better with Communism? The Case of Sci-Hub", trans. Kevin Hawkins and Anna Pechenina, 20 May 2016. Transcript and translation. Talk given via Skype at the UNT Open Access Symposium, University of North Texas, Denton, TX. (Russian),(English)
• Tomislav Medak, Marcell Mars, "Amateur Librarian - A Course in Critical Pedagogy", in Mondothèque: A Radiated Book / Un livre irradiant / Een irradiërend boek, Brussels: Constant, 2016. (English)
  • "Bibliothécaire amateur - un cours de pédagogie critique", in Mondothèque: A Radiated Book / Un livre irradiant / Een irradiërend boek, Brussels: Constant, 2016. (French)
• Dušan Barok, "A Book of the Web", in Mondothèque: A Radiated Book / Un livre irradiant / Een irradiërend boek, Brussels: Constant, 2016. (English)
• Yuri Dergunov (Юрий Дергунов), Alena Lyasheva (Алёна Ляшева), "Borba s kopiraytom ne mozhet ne byt' politicheskoy. Aleksandra Elbakyan" [Борьба с копирайтом не может не быть политической. Александра Элбакян], September, 22 Nov 2016. Interview with the founder of Sci-Hub. (Russian)
  • "Boj s copyrightem je nutně politický", trans. Miroslav Tomek, A2larm, 29 Nov 2016. (Czech)
• "Happy birthday, Ubu.com!", 30 Nov 2016. Posted on Nettime.

Journal issues and special sections

• LIBREAS. Library Ideas 2: "Das Elektronische Buch", 2005. (German)
• Tribuna: "HAIP festival & Tribuna: Hack-Act-Interact-Progress", Ljubljana: Student Organisation of the University of Ljubljana, Dec 2012, 8 pp. A section in the student monthly, based on the HAIP 2012: Public Library / Javna knjižnica festival. Texts by Kaja Kraner, Tina Dolinšek, and interviews with Marcell Mars and Dušan Barok. (Slovenian)
• New Formations 78: "Materialities of Text: Between the Codex and the Net", London: Lawrence & Wishart, Aug 2013. [19]

Discussions

• "Publishing In Convergence", -empyre- list discussion moderated by Michael Deiter, Morgan Currie and John Haltiwanger, Jun 2010.
• Jodi Dean, Sean Dockray, Alessandro Ludovico, Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Nicholas Thoburn and Dmitry Vilensky, "Materialities of Independent Publishing: A Conversation with AAAAARG, Chto Delat?, I Cite, Mute, and Neural", New Formations 78, London: Lawrence & Wishart, Aug 2013, pp 157-178.
• Andre Meister, "E-Book-Piraten im Interview: 'Die Buchverleger machen genau die selben Fehler wie die Musikindustrie'", Netzpolitik.org, 25 Sep 2013. (German)
  • "Interviews with E-Book-Pirates: “The book publishing industry is repeating the same mistakes of the music industry”", Netzpolitik.org, 27 Sep 2013.
• "aaaaarg lawsuit digest", Nettime list discussion, Jan 2016.
• "Sci-Hub/LibGen in Blogs and the Media: A Recent Bibliography", compiled by Stephen McLaughlin, 19 Mar 2016.

Academic research and writing

• Roger Chartier, "Bibliothèques sans murs", ch. 3 in Chartier, L'ordre des livres, Aix-en-Provence: Alinea, 1992. (French)
  • "Libraries Without Walls", trans. Lydia Cochrane, Representations 42: "Future Libraries" (Spring 1993), pp 38-52; rev. as ch. 3 in Chartier, The Order of Books, Stanford University Press, 1994, pp 61-88, n108-112, PDF.
• Roger Chartier, "Languages, Books, and Reading from the Printed Word to the Digital Text", trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan, Critical Inquiry 31 (Autumn 2004), pp 133-152.
• James A. Evans, "Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship", Science 321:5887 (18 Jul 2008), pp 395-399. Discussion: Gingras, et al.; Wray; Bartheld, et al.; Andersen; Evans (2009), Verstak, et al. (2014).
• Gary Hall, Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now, University of Minnesota Press, 2008, 301 pp.
• Rasmus Fleischer, Boken & Biblioteket, Stockholm: Ink bokförlag, 2011, 192 pp. [20] (Swedish)
• Joe Karaganis (ed.), Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, Social Science Research Council, 2011, 440 pp.
• Hans-Christoph Hobohm, "Can Digital Libraries Generate Knowledge?", Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung 37:3 (141): "Controversies around the Digital Humanities", 2012, pp 218-229. [21]
• Jonas Andersson Schwarz, Online File Sharing: Innovations in Media Consumption, Routledge, 2013.
• Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Matthew Battles, The Library Beyond the Book, Harvard University Press, 2014, 176 pp. [22] [23]
• Janneke Adema, The Perseverance of Print-Based Authorship within Humanities Scholarship, 2014ff. Ph.D. Dissertation.
• Balázs Bodó, "A Short History of the Russian Digital Shadow Libraries", 4 Nov 2014.
• Dennis Tenen, Maxwell Foxman, "Book Piracy as Peer Preservation", Computational Culture 5, 9 Nov 2014.
• Balázs Bodó, "Libraries in the Post-Scarcity Era", in Copyrighting Creativity: Creative Values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, ed. Porsdam, Ashgate, 2015. [24]
• Jonas Andersson Schwarz, "Honorability and the Pirate Ethic", ch 4 in A Reader in International Media Piracy: Pirate Essays, ed. Tilman Baumgärtel, Amsterdam University Press, 2015, pp 81-110.
• Balázs Bodó, "Pirates in the Library – An Inquiry into the Guerilla Open Access Movement", Jul 2016. Paper prepared for the 8th Annual Workshop of the International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property, CREATe, University of Glasgow, UK, 6-8 July 2016.
• Cassius Adair, Lisa Nakamura, "The Digital Afterlives of This Bridge Called My Back: Woman of Color Feminism, Digital Labor, and Networked Pedagogy", American Literature 89:2, Jun 2017, pp 255-278. [25]
• Joe Karaganis (ed.), Shadow Libraries: Access to Educational Materials in the Digital Age, MIT Press, forthcoming 2018.

Survey articles

• Janneke Adema, "Scanners, Collectors and Aggregators. On the ‘Underground Movement’ of (Pirated) Theory Text Sharing", Open Reflections blog, 20 Sep 2009.
• Alessandro Ludovico, "Die dehnbare Bibliothek. Bücherdigitalisierung und daran anknüpfende Kunstprojekte", Springerin 3, Vienna, 2013. (German)
  • "The Liquid Library", Eurozine, 26 Aug 2013.
• Sarah Hamerman, "Cataloging Plunder: Thoughts on the Digital Text-Sharing Underground", LIS Theory blog, 20 Nov 2014; version as Pirate Libraries and the Fight for Open Information", The Media 61: The Immaterial Digital Labor Issue, 5 Sep 2015.
• Pelle Snickars, "Publikationshack", in Universitetet som medium, eds. Matts Lindström and Adam Wickberg Månsson, Stockholm: Mediehistoriskt arkiv, 2015, pp 9-46. (Swedish)

Further reading

Texts listed on the wiki pages of respective initiatives: UbuWeb, Aaaaarg, Monoskop, Library Genesis.

See also

Digital humanities, Art servers, Media archives, Documentation science, Commons, Copyright activism, Internet activism