Shadow libraries

For independent, shadow, feminist, free/libre, self-hosted, pirate, autonomous, collective, community and artist digital libraries

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  aaaaarg

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  UbuWeb

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  Monoskop

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  Memory of the World

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  textz.com

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  Monoskop Log

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  Bibliotecha

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  Library Genesis

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  Sci-Hub

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  Anna's Archive

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  Aesthetics of the Commons, book, 2021

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  Duchamp Is My Lawyer, book, 2020

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  Guerrilla Open Access, book, 2018

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  Happy birthday, Ubu.com!, 2016

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  In solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub, open letter, 2015

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  Public Library, book, 2015

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  Public Library, video from conference, 2014

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  Public Library, video channel

Libraries

• AAAAARG (originally AAARG, the acronym of Artists, Architects, and Activists Reading Group) is an online text repository for critical theory, arts, humanities and social sciences. Established c.2004 by Sean Dockray as part of The Public School, San Francisco. Website. Twitter.

• UbuWeb is an online archive of avant-garde art initiated by conceptual artist Kenneth Goldsmith. Founded in 1996, New York. Website. Twitter.

• Monoskop is an independent web-based educational resource and research platform for arts, culture and humanities. Monoskop was initiated in 2004 in the context of experimental digital culture in Bratislava and the wider region. Founding editor: Dušan Barok. The sister library Monoskop Log started in 2009. Website. Monoskop Log. Mastodon.

• Memory of the World started as a proof of concept of the Public Library initiative. Established 2012 by Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak and Dubravka Sekulić; close to mama, Zagreb. Website. Twitter.

• Textz.com hosts theory and fiction. Established 2001 by Sebastian Lütgert/ROLUX, Berlin. Website.

• Library Genesis, a host to 3 million books. Established 2008. Website.

• Sci-Hub provides mass and public access to 60 million research papers. Established 2011 by Alexandra Elbakyan. Twitter. Anna's Archive's SciDB.

• Anna's Archive, a mirror for Library Genesis, Sci-Hub, Z-Library and Internet Archive Controlled Digital Lending.

• Radovan from planet Meta, search engine

• ...

Conferences, symposia, exhibitions, workshops, seminars, discussions

• The Oil of the 21st Century: Perspectives on Intellectual Property, conference and event series, Berlin & Umea & Mumbai, 18 Oct-22 Dec 2007.

• Processing the Archive: Towards a Collaborative Model of Knowledge Production?, session, part of the Speak, Memory: On Archives and Other Strategies of (Re)activation of Cultural Memory symposium, Rawabet Theater, Cairo, 30 Oct 2010.

• Properties of the Autonomous Archive, Max Mueller Bhavan Library, Mumbai, 7-8 Jan 2011. Video.

• 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. [2]

• 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. 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. Program. Video. Photos.

• 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. Video.

• 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.

• Interfacing the Law, Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, Spring 2017. Seminar in experimental publishing, convened by Femke Snelting.

• Pravo na stanovanje, pravo na obrazovanje – javne borbe i javna knjižnica / Public Library/Javna knjižnica: digitalni arhivi, arhitektura i aktivizam, exhibition, workshop and discussion, Omladinski centar CK13 & Galerija SULUV, Novi Sad, 4-12 May 2017. Catalogue PDF.

• The House That Heals the Soul, exhibition, Centre for Contemporary Art Glasgow, 22 Jul-3 Sep 2017. Curators: Viviana Checchia, Ainslie Roddick, Nick Thurston. [11]

• "Caring for the Open: Custodianship, Accessibility" panel discussion at GfM-Jahrestagung 2017: Zugänge, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, 5 Oct 2017.

• Creating Commons workshop, HEK, Basel, 19-22 Oct 2017.

• Knowledge Architectures: Lahore workshop, Centre for Governance and Policy, IT University of the Punjab in Lahore, Pakistan, 12-13 Mar 2018.

• Shadow Libraries: UbuWeb in Athens exhibitions and symposia, Onassis Cultural Center & National Museum of Contemporary Art (ESTE), Athens, 16-18 Mar 2018. Booklet PDF.

• Interfacing the Law (2018), Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, Spring 2018. Seminar in experimental publishing, convened by Femke Snelting.

• Artistic Shadow Libraries video installation, within Find the File festival, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 21-24 Mar 2019. Cornelia Sollfrank’s interview montage shows artists creating web archives as commons practice.

• Interfacing the Law (2019), Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, Spring 2019. Seminar in experimental publishing, convened by Femke Snelting.

• Pirate Care, conference, Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University, 19-20 Jun 2019. CfP. FB. Video.

• Open Scores exhibition and workshops, Panke Gallery, Berlin, 21 Sep-12 Oct 2019. Curated by Creating Commons (Shusha Niederberger, Cornelia Sollfrank, Felix Stalder). Catalogue. Exh. guide. FB.

• Pirate.Care: A Collective Syllabus Writing Retreat, Rijeka, 25-29 Nov 2019. Report: Sirovica (Kulturpunkt, CR).

• Paper Struggles / Public Library and the Property Form, exhibition and seminar, Raven Row, London, 9-11 Dec 2019. Organised by Post Office (Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University). Conceived by Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak, following the invitation of Kaja Marczewska. Photos. FB event. [12] [13] [14]

• Pirate Care: Learning From Disobedience, exhibition, Exportdrvo, Delta, Rijeka, 8-31 Oct 2020. Organised by Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars, and Tomislav Medak. FB.

• Paper Struggles; Public Library / Borbe s papirom; Javna knjižnica, exhibition, Gallery Nova, Zagreb, 16-24 Oct 2020. Organised by Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak. Photos.

• Unbound Libraries, worksession, Brussels, Rotterdam, Utrecht, North-England and online, 31 May-5 Jun 2020. Organised by Constant. Audio and video. Documentation. [15]

• Experimental Publishing and Alternative Networked Cultures, panel discussion, Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing, Reading University / online, 29 Apr 2021. Convened by Ruth Blacksell and Lozana Rossenova, with contributions from Karen Di Franco, Aymeric Mansoux, Marcell Mars, and Tomislav Medak. Video (130 min).

• Reading the Library: An exhibition on feminist and de-colonial approaches to systems of ordering knowledge, exhibition, Sitterwerk, St.Gallen, 29 Aug-7 Nov 2021. Concept and realisation: Barbara Biedermann, Lucie Kolb und Eva Weinmayr. With contributions by Amanda Belantara (US), Delphine Chapuis-Schmitz (CH), Emily Drabinski (US), Feminist Search Tools (NL), Matthias Gabi (CH), Infrastructural Manoeuvres (NL, BE), Constant (BE), The Rewrite (CH), Nora Schmidt (AT), Eva Weinmayr (UK), Bibliothek Wyborada (CH).

• Teaching the Radical Catalogue: A Syllabus 2021–22, Kunstbibliothek and Werkstoffarchiv Sitterwerk, St. Gallen, 2021-2022. Instructors: Eva Weinmayr and Lucie Kolb. Part of the Reading the Library exhibition. Course resources.

• Les formes de la piraterie, La Cambre/erg, Brussels, 6-10 Nov 2023.

• Unarchive, online exhibition, mur.at, Graz, 2023. Artists: Ricardo Ginès, Steffen Köhn, Nicole Kouts, Wouter Moraal, Martin Nadal, Miguel Rangil, Tabita Rezaire, Nestor Siré, Huda Takriti, Pim Zwier, and the Schuberttheater.

Interventions, research, projects

Bibliotecha

• 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, Andrea Francke and Eva Weinmayr, 2011-2014. A project on book piracy, the concept of authorship and politics of copyright. [16] Video interview with Francke and Weinmayer by Coco Sollfrank, 32 min.

• Giving What You Don't Have, an artistic research project by Cornelia Sollfrank, since 2012.

• Bibliotecha, a framework to facilitate the local distribution of digital publications within a small community. It relies on a microcomputer running open-source software to serve books over a local wifi hotspot. Created since 2013 by Yoana Buzova, Lasse van den Bosch Christensen, André Castro, Lucia Dossin, Max Dovey, Michaela Lakova, Martino Morandi, Ana Luísa Moura, Lídia Pereira, Roel Roscam Abbing, et al.

• Worm Pirate Bay, a physical library at WORM, Rotterdam, hosting an eclectic collection of avant-garde media, from zines and books to CDs and DVDs. Visitors can burn DVDs, digitise VHS tapes, and copy books and magazines using photocopier.

• Creating Commons, research project exploring interstitial practices which open the space between art and commons, Jan 2017-Jan 2020. Conducted by Felix Stalder, Cornelia Sollfrank and Shusha Niederberger. Based at the Institute for Contemporary Art Research, Zurich University of the Arts. In cooperation with HeK (House of Electronic Arts Basel).

• Pirate Care, a syllabus, a research process - primarily based in the transnational European space - that maps the increasingly present forms of activism at the intersection of “care” and “piracy”.

• Bootleg Library, a collection of republished texts and the readers collected around them. A project by Simon Browne.

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.

• Ubu@50 :: Everything is Temporary, Interliber, Pavillion 7, stall 20, Zagreb Fair, 7-12 Nov 2023. Intervention.

Publications, resources

Collections

Video

• Properties of the Autonomous Archive, Mumbai, 7-8 Jan 2011. Video recordings of talks held at the Max Mueller Bhavan Library, Mumbai. (English)

• HAIP 2012: Public Library / Javna knjižnica, Ljubljana, 28-30 Nov 2012. Video recordings of talks held at Kiberpipa. (English)

• An Archive/Live Archive/UnArchive and Public Library, Novi Sad, 15-16 Jul 2013. Video recordings of talks held at kuda and CK13 Youth Center. (English)

• 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)

• Underground E-publishing, (2), (3), (4), Rotterdam, 23 May 2014. Video recordings of talks held at WORM.

• Public Library: Rethinking the Infrastructures of Knowledge Production, Stuttgart, 30 Oct-23 Nov 2014. Video recordings from the conference held at Württembergsicher Kunstverein (WKV) & Akademie Schloss Solitude.

• Ideographies of Knowledge, Mons, 3 Oct 2015. Video recordings of talks held at Mundaneum.

• Pirate Care, Coventry, 19-20 Jun 2019. Video recordings of talks held at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University.

• Ubu@50 — 50 Ubus: A Virtual Conference, Moisé Palace, Cres, Croatia, 6-10 April 2024. Videos.

Print

• Javna knjižnica / Public Library, eds. Tomislav Medak, Marcell Mars, and WHW, Zagreb: WHW & Multimedia Institute, 2015, 144 pp. Texts by McKenzie Wark, Tomislav Medak, Marcell Mars, Manar Zarroug, and Paul Otlet. (English)/(Croatian)

• Davide Giorgetta and Valerio Nicoletti's interviews with Dušan Barok, Geert Lovink, Janneke Adema, Henry Warwick, 2015. (English)

• Guerrilla Open Access, ed. Memory of the World, Coventry: Post Office Press, Rope Press, and Memory of the World, 2018, 34 pp. Texts by Memory of the World, Christopher Kelty, Balázs Bodó, and Laurie Allen. (English)

• The Library Is Open, Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute (XPUB Special Issue 09), Jul 2019, 92 pp. Website. (English)

• Aesthetics of the Commons, eds. Cornelia Sollfrank, Felix Stalder and Shusha Niederberger, Zurich: diaphanes, Jan 2021, 275 pp. (English)

Online

• Interfacing the Law, Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute (XPUB Special Issue 3), Jun 2017. (English)

• Interfacing the Law, Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute (XPUB Special Issue 06), Jun 2018. (English)

• The Library Is Open, Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute (XPUB Special Issue 09), Jun 2019. Publication PDF. (English)

• Inverse Reader, ed. Dušan Barok, Monoskop, Sep 2019ff. A collection of 64 texts, talks and conversations about shadow, independent and artists’ digital libraries. [17] (English)

• Ubu@50 – 50 Ubus: Everything Is Temporary, eds. Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak, Zagreb: Multimedia Institute, May 2024. Collectively written hyperlinked publication. (English)

Essays, talks, statements, conversations, interviews

• A.S.Ambulanzen, "napster was only the beginning", textz.com, Mar 2001. (English)

• Aaron Swartz, "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto", Jul 2008. (English)
  • translations

• Janneke Adema, "Scanners, Collectors and Aggregators. On the ‘Underground Movement’ of (Pirated) Theory Text Sharing", Open Reflections blog, 20 Sep 2009.

• Sean Dockray, "The Scan and the Export", Fillip 12: "Critical Forms of Publicness", Fall 2010, pp 98-110. [18] 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. (English)

• Kenneth Goldsmith, "UbuWeb at 15 Years: An Overview", Poetry Foundation, 26 Apr 2011. (English)

• Matthew Fuller, "In the Paradise of Too Many Books: An Interview with Sean Dockray", Mute, London, 4 May 2011. (English)

• 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; written in the wake of the closure of library.nu. (English)

• Voja Antonić, "Our Beloved Bookscanner", Memory of the World, 28 Oct 2012. (English)

• 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. (English)

• 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. (English)

• Alessandro Ludovico, "Die dehnbare Bibliothek. Bücherdigitalisierung und daran anknüpfende Kunstprojekte", Springerin 3, Vienna, Aug 2013. (German)
  • "The Liquid Library", Eurozine, 26 Aug 2013. (English)

• Aideen Doran, "Free Libraries for Every Soul: Dreaming of the Online Library", The Bear, Mar 2014. [19] (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. (English)

• 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. (English)

• Shannon Mattern, "Library as Infrastructure", Places, 9 Jun 2014. (English)

• 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; reposted on Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft: Open-Media-Studies-Blog, 17 Dec 2018. On the idea of public library. (English)
  • "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. (English)

• Marcell Mars, Klemo Vladimir, "Download & How to: Calibre & let's share books", Memory of the World, 28 Oct 2014. (English)

• Dušan Barok, "Poetics of Research", Public Library conference, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, 1 Nov 2014. On the cultural algorithms historically conditioned by scholarly research and publishing. (English)

• Dennis Tenen, Maxwell Foxman, "Book Piracy as Peer Preservation", Computational Culture 4, 9 Nov 2014. (English)

• Sarah Hamerman, "Cataloging Plunder: Thoughts on the Digital Text-Sharing Underground", LIS Theory blog, 20 Nov 2014; upd. as Pirate Libraries and the Fight for Open Information", The Media 61: The Immaterial Digital Labor Issue, 5 Sep 2015. (English)

• Felix Stalder, Cornelia Sollfrank, "Weitergeben, was einem selbst nicht gehört", Springerin 21(1): "Kritische Netzpraxis", Winter 2015, pp 35-37. An interview about Giving What You Don't Have. [20] (German)

• Davide Giorgetta and Valerio Nicoletti's interviews with Dušan Barok, Geert Lovink, Janneke Adema, Henry Warwick, 2015. (English)

• McKenzie Wark, "Metadata Punk", in Javna knjižnica / Public Library, eds. Tomislav Medak, Marcell Mars, and WHW, Zagreb: WHW & Multimedia Institute, 2015, pp 111-117. (English)
  • "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. (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. (English)
  • "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. (Croatian)

• Dušan Barok, "More Than Numbers, Less Than Words", Javna knjižnica / Public Library conference, Nova Gallery, Zagreb, Jun 2015. (English)

• 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)

• Alexandra Elbakyan, "I am writing to clarify some details on Elsevier v. Sci-Hub", 15 Sep 2015. [21] (English)

• Dubravka Sekulić, "Legal Hacking and Space: What Can Urban Commons Learn From the Free Software Hackers?", derive 61 (2015); posted in Eurozine, 4 Nov 2015. (English)

• "In solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub", Custodians.online, 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: "The Total Archive", eds. Boris Jardine and Christopher M. Kelty, Mar 2016. (English)

• "The Academia_edu Files", Liquid Books, Apr 2016. (English)

• Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak, Dubravka Sekulić, "Taken Literally", in We Need It - We Do It: Croatia at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition / La Biennale di Venezia 2016, eds. Emina Višnić and Miranda Veljačić, Split: Platforma 9.81, May 2016, pp 228-235. (English)

• Marcell Mars, "Memory of the World", IZK Institute for Contemporary Art, Graz, 12 May 2016, 40 min. Video; invited talk as part of the annual 'Graz Architecture Lectures'. [22] (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, Sep 2016, pp 48-56, PDF. Zotero. (English)
  • "Bibliothécaire amateur - un cours de pédagogie critique", in Mondothèque: A Radiated Book / Un livre irradiant / Een irradiërend boek, Brussels: Constant, Sep 2016, pp 57-65, PDF. (French)

• Michael Murtaugh, "A Bag but Is Language Nothing of Words", in Mondothèque: A Radiated Book / Un livre irradiant / Een irradiërend boek, Brussels: Constant, Sep 2016, pp 66-79, PDF. (English)

• Dušan Barok, "A Book of the Web", in Mondothèque: A Radiated Book / Un livre irradiant / Een irradiërend boek, Brussels: Constant, Sep 2016, pp 80-83, PDF. (English)
  • "Knižnice zväzkov siete", Monoskop, Jun 2017. (Slovak)

• Matthew Fuller, "The Indexalist", in Mondothèque: A Radiated Book / Un livre irradiant / Een irradiërend boek, Brussels: Constant, Sep 2016, pp 84-87, PDF. (English)
  • "De Indexalist", in Mondothèque: A Radiated Book / Un livre irradiant / Een irradiërend boek, Brussels: Constant, Sep 2016, pp 88-91, PDF. (Dutch)

• Clemens Apprich, "Ora et labora (et lege). Zur Politik postdigitaler Handlungsfelder", Kunstforum 242: "Postdigital 1", Sep-Oct 2016. [23] (German)

• 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!", Custodians.online, 30 Nov 2016; posted on Nettime, 30 Nov 2016. (English)

• What, How & for Whom / WHW, "'There Is Something Political in the City Air'", in Extending the Dialogue, Ljubljana: Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory, Berlin: Archive Books, and Vienna: Erste Foundation, Dec 2016, pp 286-307. [24] (English)

• Petar Jandrić, Ana Kuzmanić, "Knowledge Commons and Activist Pedagogies: From Idealist Positions to Collective Actions: Conversation with Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak", in Jandrić, Learning in the Age of Digital Reason, Rotterdam: Sense, 2017, pp 243-269. (English)

• Sean Dockray, Benjamin Forster, "README.md", Hyperreadings, 15 Feb 2018; repr. in Distributed, eds. David Blamey and Brad Haylock, London: Open Editions, 2018, pp 198-213. (English)

• Dušan Barok, "Shadow Libraries", Shadow Libraries: UbuWeb in Athens symposium, National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST), Athens, Mar 2018. On access to culture and knowledge. [25] (English)

• Shannon Mattern, "Making Knowledge Available: The Media of Generous Scholarship", Public Seminar, 22 Mar 2018. (English)

• Dubravka Sekulić, "On Knowledge and 'Stealing'", Funambulist 17, May-June 2018, pp 8-10, PDF. (English)

• Cornelia Sollfrank, "The Surplus of Copying: How Shadow Libraries and Pirate Archives Contribute to the Creation of Cultural Memory and the Commons", originalcopy, Nov 2018; repr. in originalcopy: Post-Digital Strategies of Appropriation, eds. Michael Kargl and Franz Thalmair, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019. [26] [27] (English)

• Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak, "Learning from #Syllabus", in State Machines: Reflections and Actions at the Edge of Digital Citizenship, Finance, and Art, eds. Yiannis Colakides, Marc Garrett, and Inte Gloerich, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2019, pp 115-128. (English)

• Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak, "Against Innovation: Compromised Institutional Agency and Acts of Custodianship", Ephemera 19(2): "Repair Matters", May 2019, pp 345-368, PDF. (English)

• XPUB, Interviews with Marcell Mars, Dubravka Sekulić, and Dušan Barok, in The Library Is Open, Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute (XPUB Special Issue 09), Jul 2019. Website. (English)

• Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak, "System of a Takedown: Control and De-commodification in the Circuits of Academic Publishing", in Andrew Lison, et al., Archives, Lüneburg: meson.press, and University of Minnesota Press, Aug 2019, pp 47-68. (English)

• Cornelia Sollfrank, Shusha Niederberger, Kevin Rittberger, Felix Stalder, Springerin 4: "Netzteil", Vienna, Oct 2019. (German)

• Cornelia Sollfrank, "Learning from Shadow Libraries", lecture, video, Nov 2019, 70 min. (English)

• Agustina Andreoletti, "Shadow Libraries: Distributed Models for the Creation and Circulation of Digital Archives", lecture, video, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, Feb 2020, 21 min. (English)

• Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak, "Against the Crisis", in of bread, wine, cars, security and peace, Vienna: Kunsthalle Wien, Mar 2020. (English)
  • "Gegen die Krise", in of bread, wine, cars, security and peace, Vienna: Kunsthalle Wien, Mar 2020. (German)

• Miljenka Buljević, "'Svijet takozvanog društva znanja svijet je nejednakosti'", Booksa.hr, Zagreb, 13 Apr 2020. (Croatian)

• Simon Browne, Tasks of the Contingent Librarian, Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute, May 2020, [100] pp. Master's thesis. [28] [29] (English)

• Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak, "Pirate Care", Artforum.com, 11 May 2020.

• Alexandra Elbakyan (Александра элбакян), Avtobiografiya versiya 1.1 [Автобиография версия 1.1], 22 May 2020, 92 pp. Autobiographical essay by the founder of Sci-Hub. [30] (Russian)

• Open Scores: How to Program the Commons, Creating Commons (Shusha Niederberger, Cornelia Sollfrank, Felix Stalder), Jun 2020, [40] pp. Exh. catalogue.

• Kenneth Goldsmith, Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb, New York: Columbia University Press, Jul 2020, x+318 pp. (English)
  • translations

• Cornelia Sollfrank, "Im Schatten der öffentlichen Bibliothek. Künstlerische Auseinandersetzungen mit den digitalen Commons", in Sich mit Sammlungen anlegen. Gemeinsame Dinge und alternative Archive, eds. Martina Griesser-Stermscheg, Nora Sternfeld, Luisa Ziaja, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020, pp 85-94. (German)

• "Dans l’ombre d’internet… des bibliothèques illégales", serveur410, Oct 2020. (French)

• Nick Thurston, "Pirate Care Syllabus", Art Monthly 440, Oct 2020, pp 16-17. [31] [32]

• Olga Goriunova, "Uploading our Libraries: The Subjects of Art and Knowledge Commons", in Aesthetics of the Commons, eds. Cornelia Sollfrank, Felix Stalder and Shusha Niederberger, Zurich: diaphanes, Jan 2021, pp 41-61. (English)

• Judith Siegmund, "Which “Aesthetics of the Commons”?", in Aesthetics of the Commons, eds. Cornelia Sollfrank, Felix Stalder and Shusha Niederberger, Zurich: diaphanes, Jan 2021, pp 81-97. (English)

• H C-(M), "Sci-Hub’s Fight Against Private Ownership of Knowledge", Netzpolitik, Jan 2021; exp. as "Cognition, Communism, and Theft: A conversation with Sci-Hub’s founder Alexandra Elbakyan", Nero, Mar 2021; reposted as "Celebrating a Decade of Knowledge. A conversation with Sci-Hub’s Alexandra Elbakyan", Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, Apr 2021. [33] [34] (English)
  • "Sci-Hubs Kampf gegen privaten Besitz von Wissenschaft", Netzpolitik, Jan 2021. (German)
  • "Cognizione, comunismo e furto: una conversazione con la fondatrice di SCI-HUB, Alexandra Elbakyan", Roars, Apr 2021. [35] (Italian)

• "Aesthetics, Commons and the Production of the Subject: An Interview with Cornelia Sollfrank and Felix Stalder", Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 16:1, 2021, pp 74-81. (English)

• Shusha Niederberger, "Radical Care – Shadow Libraries und die Imagination anderer Institutionen", Fabrikzeitung: "Der radikale Katalog", eds. Lucie Kolb and Eva Weinmayr, Zürich: Rote Fabrik, Dec 2021. (German)

• Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy, Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, "Veritas and Copyright: The Public Library in Peril", punctum books, Sep 2022. (English)

• Tomislav Medak, Marcell Mars, "Public Library and the Return of the Repressed Memory of the World", in Stories and Threads: Perspectives on Art Archives, eds. Sara Buraya Boned, Jennifer Fitzgibbon, and Sezin Romi, L'Internationale, 2022, pp 74-89. [36] (English)

• Nick Thurston, "In Solidarity and From Curiosity", in Ubu@50 – 50 Ubus: Everything Is Temporary, eds. Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak, Zagreb: Multimedia Institute, May 2024. Conversation with Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak, and Dušan Barok. (English)

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", eds. Sas Mays and Nicholas Thoburn, London: Lawrence & Wishart, Aug 2013, 207 pp. TOC. Review: Adema.

• Fabrikzeitung: "Der radikale Katalog", eds. Lucie Kolb and Eva Weinmayr, Zürich: Rote Fabrik, Dec 2021. Special issue of the magazine. (German),(English)

Discussions

• "Publishing In Convergence", -empyre- list discussion moderated by Michael Dieter, 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

• Brewster Kahle, "Ethics Of Digital Librarianship", Feb 1992.

• 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.

• Christian Vandendorpe, Du papyrus à l'hypertexte: essai sur les mutations du texte et de la lecture, Montréal: Boréal, 1999, 271 pp; Paris: Découverte, 1999, 271 pp. (French)
  • From Papyrus to Hypertext: Toward the Universal Digital Library, trans. Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009, 191 pp, ARG. Reviews: Anker (Leonardo), Warwick (J Am Soc Inf Sci Tech), Stinson (Comm Rev), Collins (Journ Mass Comm Q). [37]

• 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. [38] (Swedish)

• Mario Biagioli, Peter Jaszi, Martha Woodmansee (eds.), Making and Unmaking Intellectual Property: Creative Production in Legal and Cultural Perspective, University of Chicago Press, 2011, 480 pp. [39]

• 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. [40]

• 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. [41] [42]

• Janneke Adema, The Perseverance of Print-Based Authorship within Humanities Scholarship, 2014ff. Ph.D. Dissertation.

• 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.

• 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.

• Davide Giorgetta, Valerio Nicoletti, Amateur: Non-Institutional Practices Between Digital Archiving and Publishing, ISIA Urbino, 2015. Master's thesis. Features interviews with Janneke Adema, Dušan Barok, Balázs Bodó, Josephine Bosma, Annet Dekker, Sean Dockray, Kenneth Goldsmith, Geert Lovink, Marcell Mars & Tomislav Medak, Domenico Quaranta, Gino Roncaglia, Femke Snelting, Henry Warwick, and Eva Weinmayr. [43] (Italian),(English)

• Pelle Snickars, "Publikationshack", in Universitetet som medium, eds. Matts Lindström and Adam Wickberg Månsson, Stockholm: Mediehistoriskt arkiv, 2015, pp 9-46. (Swedish)

• Daniel Snelson, Variable Format: Media Poetics and the Little Database, University of Pennsylvania, 2015, 209 pp. PhD dissertation. Focuses on Textz.com, Eclipse, PennSound, and UbuWeb. [44]

• Guillaume Cabanac, "Bibliogifts in LibGen? A Study of a Text-Sharing Platform Driven by Biblioleaks and Crowdsourcing", Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 67:4, Apr 2016, pp 874-884.

• 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.

• Abigail De Kosnik, Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom, MIT Press, Sep 2016, x+430 pp.

• 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. [45]

• Albert N. Greco, "The Kirtsaeng and SCI-HUB Cases: The Major U.S. Copyright Cases in the Twenty-First Century", Publishing Research Quarterly 33:3, Sep 2017, pp 238-253.

• Alessandro Ludovico, "Temporary and Distributed Libraries, Breaking Boundaries, Creating New Resources", in ISEA 2017 Manizales Bio-Creation and Peace: Proceedings of the 23rd International Symposium on Electronic Arts, eds. Julián Jaramillo Arango, et al., Manizales: Universidad de Caldas, and ISEA International, 2017, pp 511-514.

• Daniel S Himmelstein, Ariel Rodriguez Romero, Jacob G Levernier, Thomas Anthony Munro, Stephen Reid McLaughlin, Bastian Greshake Tzovaras, Casey S Greene, "Research: Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature", eLife, 9 Feb 2018.

• Joe Karaganis (ed.), Shadow Libraries: Access to Educational Materials in Global Higher Education, MIT Press, 2018, 313 pp. Contributors: Balázs Bodó, Laura Czerniewicz, Miroslaw Filiciak, Mariana Fossatti, Jorge Gemetto, Eve Gray, Evelin Heidel, Joe Karaganis, Lawrence Liang, Pedro Mizukami, Jhessica Reia, Alek Tarkowski.

• Joe Karaganis, Balázs Bodó, "Russia is Building a New Napster — But for Academic Research", Washington Post, 13 Jul 2018.

• Mario Hibert, Digitalni odrast i postdigitalna dobra. Kritičko bibliotekarstvo, disruptivni mediji i taktičko obrazovanje, Zagreb: Multimedia Institute & Institut za političku ekologiju, Sep 2018, 152 pp. (Croatian)

• Clemens Blümel, Balazs Bodo, et al., "Piratical demand as a form of impact indicator and reaching unexpected audiences", in OPENing UP new methods indicators and tools for peer review, impact measurement and dissemination of research results, 2018, in 50-60.

• Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, "The Licit and Illicit Nature of Mass Digitization", ch 4 in Thylstrup, The Politics of Mass Digitization, MIT Press, 2018, pp 79-100. On Lib.ru, Monoskop, and UbuWeb.

• Petar Jandrić, Sarah Hayes, "The Postdigital Challenge of Redefining Academic Publishing from the Margins", Learning, Media and Technology, Feb 2019.

• Neda Atanasoski, Kalindi Vora, "Sharing, Collaboration, and the Commons in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: The Appropriative Techniques of Technoliberal Capitalism", ch 2 in Atanasoski, Vora, Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, Mar 2019, pp 54-86. On Public Library.

• Sarah Müller, Schattenbibliotheken - Auswirkungen auf Forschung und Bibliotheken am Beispiel von Sci-Hub, Cologne: Technische Hochschule Köln, Jul 2019, 71 pp. Bachelor thesis. [46] (German)

• Carlos Bernardo Caycedo Casallas, Updating Civil Disobedience: Whistleblowing, Anonymous Hacktivism, and Academic Piracy, University of Amsterdam, 2019, 177 pp. PhD dissertation. [47]

• Abigail De Kosnik, "Piracy Is the Future of Culture: Speculating about Media Preservation after Collapse", Third Text, Nov 2019.

• Roberto Cruz Arzabal, "La piratería como forma imposible: circulación y estratificación de la teoría contemporánea", in Exclusión y deriva: dinámicas fronterizas de la digitalidad, eds. Johanna C. Ángel Reyes and Joseba Buj, Mexico City: Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de México, Jan 2020, pp 163-186. (Spanish)

• Balázs Bodó, Dániel Antal, Zoltán Puha, "Can scholarly pirate libraries bridge the knowledge access gap? An empirical study on the structural conditions of book piracy in global and European academia", PLoS ONE 15:12, Dec 2020.

• Anna Poletti, "Six Contracting Theses on Literature in the Polity of Literature" ArtsEverywhere, Feb 2021.

• Ana Inkret, "Zaznamek o senčnih knjižnicah", Časopis za kritiko znanosti 49:282, Ljubljana, 2021, pp 235-239. (Slovenian)

• Georgie Newson, "In the Shadow Library", London Review of Books, 14 Dec 2022.

• Sandra Fauconnier, "Challenges in the Creation, Perception and Distribution of Documentation", in Documentation as Art: Expanded Digital Practices, eds. Annet Dekker and Gabriella Giannachi, Routledge, Jan 2023, pp 75-86.

Further reading

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

See also

Free software, Internet activism, Community servers, Copyright activism, Digital libraries, Commons, Art and activism