Digital libraries

Also electronic libraries, online libraries.

Initiatives

This section is dedicated to online library initiatives hosting publications in multiple languages.

Initiatives with dedicated wiki pages

• Aaaaarg
• Anna's Archive
• Bibliotecha
• Balázs Bodó
• André Castro
• Brewster Kahle
• Library Genesis
• Library.nu
• Marxists Internet Archive
• About Monoskop
• Monoskop Log
• Dubravka Sekulić

Art and humanities libraries

• Marxists Internet Archive, est. 1990 by Zodiac, online since 1993; hosts the works of Marxist, communist, socialist, and anarchist writers.
• Electronic Poetry Center hosts poetry books and periodicals; also lists contents from Eclipse & Jacket 2 Reissues. Founded in 1994 by Loss Pequeño Glazier and Charles Bernstein at SUNY Buffalo.
• UbuWeb, est. 1996 by Kenneth Goldsmith as a resource for visual, concrete and sound poetry, soon expanded to include historical texts related to avant-garde art and other material.
• Textz.com, est. 2001 by Sebastian Lütgert/ROLUX; hosted theory and fiction in plain text.
• Aaaaarg, est. c2004 by Sean Dockray in the framework of the Public School, originally focused on critical theory, later expanded to include art and the humanities as such.
• Monoskop, est. 2004 by Dušan Barok as a research initiative for documentation of media art, later expanded to art, media and the humanities. Monoskop Log has branched out in 2009.
• Memory of the World, est. c2012 by Marcell Mars to assist universal access to documentary heritage.

See also

• Digital libraries for the Classics
• "More resources" section at Monoskop Log
• Initiatives featured on the Memory of the World website

General interest libraries

• Library Genesis (LibGen), has multiple interfaces, mirrors and versions [1] [2] [3]; based in Russia.
• Library.nu, formerly Ebooksclub and Gigapedia, closed down in Feb 2012.
• Bibliotik, a torrent site for e-books.
• Open Library, an e-book lending library, operated by the Internet Archive.

Public domain and Creative Commons 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 the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
• 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.
• Wikisource, a Wikimedia project started 2003. Contains around .5M texts in wiki form.

See also

• Listings on Filesharingtalk.com

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.

Events

Workshops and conferences

• Libraries, Access to Knowledge, and Self-Learning: From the Library of Alexandria to aaaaarg.org panel at MobilityShifts summit, New York, Oct 2011. [4]
• HAIP 2012: Public Library / Javna knjižnica conference and exhibition, Kiberpipa, Ljubljana, 28-30 Nov 2012. MemoryOfTheWorld.org, Video documentation.
• 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.
• Public Library: Rethinking the Infrastructures of Knowledge Production conference and exhibition, Württembergsicher Kunstverein (WKV) & Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, 30 Oct-23 Nov 2014. Video documentation.

Interventions

• 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. [5]

Literature

Essays and talks

• Sean Dockray, "The Scan and the Export", Fillip 12: "Critical Forms of Publicness", Fall 2010, pp 98-110. [6] 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.
• Matthew Fuller, "In the Paradise of Too Many Books: An Interview with Sean Dockray", Mute, London, 4 May 2011.
• Lawrence Liang, "Shadow Libraries", e-flux 37 (Sep 2012). On the library as heterotopia.
• 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.
• 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 a deeper entanglement of scholarly references and hyperlinks.
• Marcell Mars, Manar Zarroug, Tomislav Medak, "Public Library (An Essay)", Memory of the World blog, 27 Oct 2014. On the idea of public library.
• Dušan Barok, "Poetics of Research", Public Library conference, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, Nov 2014. On cultural algorithms historically conditioned by scholarly research and publishing.
• Pelle Snickars, "Publikationshack", in Universitetet som medium, eds. Matts Lindström and Adam Wickberg Månsson, Stockholm: Mediehistoriskt arkiv, 2015, pp 9-46. (Swedish)

Journal issues and special sections

• Tribuna: Special issue on Open Access: HAIP 2012 addendum, Ljubljana, Dec 2012. (Slovenian)
• New Formations 78: "Materialities of Text: Between the Codex and the Net", London: Lawrence & Wishart, Aug 2013. [7]

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.
• SrrhHamerman, "Cataloging Plunder: Thoughts on the Digital Text-Sharing Underground", LIS Theory blog, 20 Nov 2014.

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.

Academic writings

• Gary Hall, Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now, University of Minnesota Press, 2008, 301 pp.
• Bodó Balázs, "Libraries in the Post-Scarcity Era", in Copyrighting Creativity: Creative values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, ed. Porsdam, Ashgate, 2015. [8]
• Joe Karaganis (ed.), Shadow Libraries, (forthcoming).

Further reading

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

See also

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