52

The Slow Cancellation of Online Libraries

On the probable demise of #Libgen and the need for private offline #libraries.

https://networkcultures.org/blog/2024/09/22/henry-warwick-the-slow-cancellation-of-online-libraries/

#books #DigitalSovereignty

@books @libraries

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] OpenTech_AUC@social.edu.nl 5 points 3 weeks ago

@OmegaMouse

Yes the author refers to a couple of archives.

Libgen, the one that we are most familiar with, is particularly useful for students/academics in the social sciences/humanities, as it has a large repository of books (old and new) in those disciplines.

Sci-hub, in contrast, is more useful for peer reviewed articles.

Interestingly the author is not that worried about books on math and physics since, as he argues, "simply paying close attention to reality" will recreate those ideas.

[-] OmegaMouse@pawb.social 2 points 3 weeks ago

Thanks for clarifying. Free access to academic information for all is a worthy goal.

One would hope that organisations hosting digital libraries of academic journals would hold those in perpetuity. But often the subscriptions are exploitatively expensive, and I'm of the opinion that such information should be made available for free. In any case, having private libraries as a backup is certainly a good idea for a variety of reasons.

The same goes for preserving the volumes of data that will inevitably be quietly binned and forgotten to save server space.

this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
52 points (100.0% liked)

Books

10265 readers
1 users here now

Book reader community.

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS