A new book acquired by the Thammasat University Library explores how new technology allows students access to knowledge, although sometimes getting the information needed can be difficult. Shadow Libraries: Access to Knowledge in Global Higher Education is shelved in the General Stacks of the Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus.

It discusses how students in India, Uruguay, and other nations get the materials they need for research, while budgets for acquisitions are reduced at most universities around the world. The book was copublished by the MIT Press and the International Development Research Centre.

As its website states,

the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) funds research in developing countries to promote growth, reduce poverty, and drive large-scale positive change. A Crown corporation, we support leading thinkers who advance knowledge and solve practical development problems. We provide the resources, advice, and training they need to implement and share their solutions with those who need them most. In short, IDRC increases opportunities — and makes a real difference in people’s lives. Working with our development partners, we multiply the impact of our investment and bring innovations to more people in more countries around the world. We offer fellowships and awards to nurture a new generation of development leaders. Our head office is located in Ottawa, Canada, while four regional offices keep us close to our work. They are located in Montevideo, Uruguay; Nairobi, Kenya; Amman, Jordan; and New Delhi, India…

Another copublisher of the book is the American Assembly at Columbia University. As its website indicates:

The American Assembly is a think tank at Columbia University, founded in 1950 by General Dwight Eisenhower… For over 60 years, it has fostered nonpartisan public-policy discussions by convening, research, and publication. Over 100 “American Assemblies” have been held on topics ranging from prison reform to healthcare to nuclear disarmament. In recent years, Assembly projects have made a wide range of contributions to economic, urban, and cultural policy, including projects on workforce development, financial regulation, and the role of the arts in American universities.

OVERVIEW

Mission

The American Assembly fosters public conversations that lead to more just, equitable, and democratic societies.  It does so by bringing research to bear on public problems, by creating new resources for public understanding, and by strengthening the forms of trust and deliberation that make democracy work… Born in the context of the Cold War, The American Assembly took democratic government as one of its foundational points of focus. Assemblies in the early decades dealt heavily with questions of federalism, political representation, political parties, electoral processes and campaigns, and the separation of powers. The overarching aim was to illuminate the workings of democracy and strengthen public trust in the American system, largely by working to ensure our institutions would be worthy of that trust.

What are Shadow Libraries?

In some places of the world, university students cannot afford the educational materials they need to graduate and write theses. They look for sources of information online and elsewhere that will provide the data they need. One way to address the problem of access to information worldwide is to promote the concept of Open Access, in which research materials are distributed online, free of charge.

On the website of the American Library Association (ALA), the oldest and largest library association in the world, founded in 1876, there is a discussion of shadow libraries. The ALA’s core values are as follows:

• Extending and expanding library services in America and around the world
• All types of libraries – academic, public, school and special
• All librarians, library staff, trustees and other individuals and groups working to improve library services
• Member service
• An open, inclusive, and collaborative environment
• Ethics, professionalism and integrity
• Excellence and innovation
• Intellectual freedom
• Social responsibility and the public good
• Sustainability

Its key action areas are

• Advocacy for Libraries and the Profession
• Diversity
• Education and Lifelong Learning
• Equitable Access to Information and Library Services
• Intellectual Freedom
• Literacy
• Organizational Excellence
• Transforming Libraries

The ALA website posting notes about shadow libraries:

Scholars have shared copyrighted material outside official channels for decades, but recent market forces, professional pressure, and novel technical exploits have allowed the large-scale automation of these practices. As a result, millions of scholarly articles, chapters, books, and papers have been aggregated in illicit collections known as “shadow libraries,” available for free download by anyone with an Internet connection. The best-known shadow libraries are Library Genesis (LibGen) and the associated website Sci-Hub, which uses pooled university credentials to access articles and add them to LibGen’s repository…

These clearly violate U.S. copyright law and lawsuits have been filed against them. The ALA examined the effect on such library services as interlibrary loan (ILL) and other aspects of libraries from this illegal activity. The preface to Shadow Libraries explains:

Several “open” publication models […] 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.

In countries from Uruguay to India, students photocopy and distribute material that in principle should not be photocopied and distributed. Shadow Libraries asks whether this system will change any time soon. The conclusion:

For students, ad hoc combinations of buying, borrowing, and copying get most of them through most of their classes. For researchers, they provide access to most of the work they need most of the time. For publishers, informal copying erodes the commercial market but also reduces pressure for non-commercial solutions such as open models and more flexible copyright rules. For universities, the mixed ecosystem saves them from taking on new expenses, responsibilities, and forms of liability for their students. This is a moment of oddly balanced forces, with evolving commercial strategies, open models, and unauthorized copying all exerting forms of pressure and constraint. There is no reason to assume that this balance is stable but, as with most complex systems, the effects of any significant change are hard to predict. In practice, organizational conservativism and inaction tend to win out.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)