Shadow Libraries: Access to Knowledge in Global Higher Education is available from MIT Press (and freely downloadable under a CC license from the MIT page).
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From the Introduction:
From the top down, Shadow Libraries explores the institutions that shape the provision of these materials, from the formal sector of universities and publishers to the broadly informal ones organized by faculty, copy shops, student unions, and students themselves. It looks at the history of policy battles over access to education in the post–World War II era and at the narrower versions that have played out in relation to research and textbooks, from library policies to book subsidies to, more recently, the several “open” publication models that have emerged in the higher education sector.
From the bottom up, Shadow Libraries explores how, simply, students get the materials they need. It maps the ubiquitous practice of photocopying and what are—in many cases—the more marginal ones of buying books, visiting libraries, and downloading from unauthorized sources. It looks at the informal networks that emerge in many contexts to share materials, from face-to-face student networks to Facebook groups, and at the processes that lead to the consolidation of some of those efforts into more organized archives that circulate offline and sometimes online—the shadow libraries of our title. If Elbakyan’s Sci-Hub is the largest of these efforts to date, the more characteristic part of her story is the prologue: the personal struggle to participate in global scientific and educational communities, and the recourse to a wide array of ad hoc strategies and networks when formal, authorized means are lacking. If Elbakyan’s story has struck a chord, it is in part because it brings this contradiction in the academic project into sharp relief—universalist in principle and unequal in practice. Shadow Libraries is a study of that tension in the digital era.
Contents
Introduction: Access from Above, Access from Below
Joe Karaganis
The Genesis of Library Genesis: The Birth of a Global Scholarly Shadow Library
Balázs Bodó
Library Genesis in Numbers: Mapping the Underground Flow of Knowledge
Balázs Bodó
Argentina: A Student-Made Ecosystem in an Era of State Retreat
Evelin Heidel
Access to Learning Resources in Post-apartheid South Africa
Eve Gray and Laura Czerniewicz
Poland: Where the State Ends, the Hamster Begins
Mirosław Filiciak and Alek Tarkowski
India: The Knowledge Thief
Lawrence Liang
Brazil: The Copy Shop and the Cloud
Pedro Mizukami and Jhessica Reia
Coda: Uruguay
Jorge Gemetto and Mariana Fossatti