User:)biyibiyibiyi(/Special Issue 09
Session with Bodó Balázs on lineage and analysis on shadow libraries
Shadow Libraries: Access to Knowledge in Global Higher Education (ed J.Karaganis)
I encountered this book because of our guest from Special Issue: Interfacing the Law, Bodó Balázs contributed to the book. The editor for the book is Joe Karaganis, who is an editor in media piracy in emerging economies. He also run a project called The Open Syllabus : http://opensyllabusproject.org/faq-2/
Notes and thoughts, in accordance to chapters:
Introduction: Access from Above, Access from Below
Elbakyan and growth of unauthorized digital archives
University in her home country, Kazakhstan did not provide subscription access to international journal database. Elbakyan relied on haphazard and slow means of accessing information - she relied on her colleagues and visiting other universities which had access.
“Unauthorized digital copies of books and articles began to be aggregated into online collections in the early 2000s. In most cases, these collections were small—personal collections of scanned materials shared via listservs and social media accounts.”
Elbakyan launched Sci-hub, which facilitated dissemination of academic journals on a network scale, by accessing(not sure in legal or illegal way) account credentials from Western universities that had subscription to academic database. This way of access accumulated a database much faster than ad-hoc and haphazard ways of collecting from acquaintance/proximity network.
“In late 2015, Elsevier, whose ScienceDirect database was a major source for Sci-Hub, obtained an injunction in a U.S. court targeting the service, LibGen, several other unauthorized book archives”
Proof of Concept, Shadow Libraries' significance in Knowledge Ecosystem reorganization
bring to light the trajectories of education and research material dissemination, “from authors to publishers and libraries, to students and researchers, and from comparatively rich universities to poorer ones”; and both formal and informal institutions that shape the provision of these materials - “formal sector of universities and publishers to the broadly informal ones organized by faculty, copy shops, student unions, and students themselves”
The informal aspect of material distribution cannot be neglected. As Bodó had said in the session - it's important for the market to understand how the shadow market works. And we learned from Rita and Pedro about copy shops in university of Porto, being a place nested in formal institution. Teachers inform the copy shop about upcoming study material, and students go there to order their copied versions. If this kind of circulation is informal, then it's an operative informality.
Lineage from Media Piracy
“Shadow Libraries grew out of a book called Media Piracy in Emerging Economies (Karaganis 2011), which brought a similar perspective to bear on the question of access to media outside the high-income West.”
“At the time, we focused on music, movies, and software, for which the CD and DVD were the enabling technologies of large-scale informal exchange.”
The broader context: expanding global higher education in emerging economies and the state's retreat
Expanding higher education in emerging economies: Brazil, India, Poland (after fall of Communist regime), South Africa(post-apartheid), Mexico; in stark comparison to Western economies such as the U.S. which student population grows at 2% annual rate.
“In the United States and many other high-income countries, this transition was buffered by the accumulated strength of the public systems, by the relatively high purchasing power of students and institutions, and by the gradualism—after the 1980s—of both student growth and state retreat.” - in this case the state's retreat in sponsoring higher education is buffered by it's economical success and high purchasing power of both students and universities. However it's not the case in emerging economies.
The Genesis of Library Genesis: The Birth of a Global Scholarly Shadow Library
(Pirate) Libraries on the Internet
I highlighted "Digital Librarianship - the digitization, collection, and cataloguing of texts, was one of the earliest use of networked computers." This sentence is informative that it defined what digital librarianship is, that is interact with digital materials; and it put history of network computing to context. Of course network computer is to host digital archives - the network infrastructure is set up for information dissemination.
First digital library: Project Gutenberg
Infrastructure: APRANET
Time: 1971
Later on, the technical obstacles for building digital libraries declined, "dream of building universal libraries became very real". Here Bodó cited Borge's Library of Babel, Vannevar Bush's As We May Think https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/, and P. Otlet's Mundaneum. https://www.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/%28SICI%291097-4571%28199704%2948%3A4%3C301%3A%3AAID-ASI3%3E3.0.CO%3B2-%23 These three examples are common for they all speculated envisioned forms of library. To list a comparison:
- Library of Babel
- Hexagon Shape
- As We May Think
A device for an individual to store all books in possession, the storage can be
- P.Otlet's Mundaneum
India: The Knowledge Thief
Visit to Rietveld Library
Splotr
Splotr is an instance of Bibliotecha implemented in the Rietveld Library. There are several reasons that made it effective:
- Wide area of Rietveld Wi-Fi network. Consider the amount of people across the network, that's quite a large community.
- In complementary to a well curated, diverse and rich physical library.
- Shared interests. It's implemented in an art school, where research is encouraged and also mandatory. Conducting research required bibliographical materials, which created an urgent need for the community.
PUB
We met two students from the Sandberg Design department, working under the collective PUB(pub for publishing), https://pub.sandberg.nl/, which is a hub to facilitate interdisciplinary collaborations across and beyond the Rietveld network. The formats of their collaboration is concurrent with the Experimental Publishing's mediums, include but not limited to radio, TV, podcasts, publishing sessions, and websites. It was interesting to see what's happening over at the Rietveld that they treated publishing as an activity and medium to facilitate collaborations between people, who might be otherwise less connected. In design and autonomous practices, publishing is another way of interfacing with the audience by using common grounds of publishing.
Session with Eva Weinmayr
Tin Tin
https://www.douban.com/doulist/68073/?start=50&sort=time&sub_type= Universal Copyright Convention in Chinese http://www.ipr.gov.cn/zhuanti/law/conventions/unesco/Universal_Copyright_Convention.html
Beta Publishing, A Day in the Court Room
https://adage.com/creativity/work/north-face-top-imagens/2174261
Annotation
What does it mean to annotate?
Notes and review for reading Stiegler's annotation essay
Tools for annotation
classification of knowledge
Mundaneum, Universal Decimal Classification System, SISO Digital Library, Chinese Library Classification System (in which we witness certain categories are prioritized for ideological representation.)
Digital Librarianship
Throughout the Special Issue I was motivated to conceptualize the definition of Digital Librarianship. Now I've been searching some concrete examples from reality that help illustrate this new concept.
The Internet as a Library
Dukšan Barok joined our meeting yesterday (04-06-2019), reading his article on searched engines helped me understand Digital Librarianship better. The article here: https://www.mondotheque.be/wiki/index.php?title=A_Book_of_the_Web , in which the notion of libraries is redefined affordances of online search engines that's able to perform full text search. "Libraries in this sense are not restricted to digitised versions of physical public or private libraries as we know them from history. Commercial search engines, intelligence agencies, and virtually all forms of online text collections can be thought of as libraries."
book recommendation algorithms
taking job of the librarian for making recommendations
curating the personal collection
tool like are.na allow user to create, archive and disseminate their customized collections.