Difference between revisions of "A public library of our own: Building feminist digital libraries"

Latest revision as of 12:55, 20 September 2019

How can I make materials rare or at risk available to others? How can I digitize books, fanzines, posters? How can I organise the printed materials my organisation and/or community are producing? Where can I find e-books? If you have one or several of those questions in mind, this how-to is for you!

Building feminist digital libraries

Public Libraries can be defined as one of those universal social innovation that benefits everyone. When truly public they can be places where all people can get access to knowledge independently of their sociodemographic, gender, cultural and professional characteristics. It’s one of those almost invisible infrastructures that we start to notice when they go extinct and we begin to miss their fundamentally inclusive and distributive nature. On the other side, Internet has completely changed our expectations and imagination about a universal access to all available knowledge for every member of society. Nowadays many public libraries are either being closed down, either cannot acquire digital books from the world’s largest publishers. Here we present four steps to become a librarian and start with others your own digital public library. Before shaping your own work flow and choosing your tools, keep in mind that public libraries are defined by a free access to books for every member of society, a catalog of books and a librarian. With books ready to be shared, meticulously cataloged, everyone is a librarian. When everyone is librarian, libraries are everywhere.

Case study: A feminist library on Memory of the world

There are many waves into feminist thinking and its theorization. This diversity is due to an intense history of social movements and struggles for gender social justice around the world and across time. Accordingly, it can be difficult to understand the many perspectives and sometimes confronting points of views. Building and sharing catalog of books on the public domain or under open or free licenses can strength your work and activism within you communities, with your allies and the people you are trying to reach out. Public libraries support a better understanding of feminism(s) and what you stand for, your motivations, how you organise, the related (collective and historical) memories you build upon and the aesthetics and imaginaries you are shaping. For more information visit the feminist library in Memory of the world.

Methodology

First Step: Digitizing books with a book scanner

You can skip this step and still become a librarian and build your own public digital library. However keep in mind that your community or organization might be filled with valuable documents that might disappear if they are never digitized, for instance fanzines, posters and flyers, call for actions, old books not edited anymore, local archives etc.

Scanning of the book: You can use a scanner or build your own bookscanner depending of time, resources and energies.

An automatic low-cost page-turning book scanner

A semi automatic bookscanner build by Memory of the World

Second Step: Postproduction of scanned images

You can use ScanTailor which is free software available for Windows and gnu/Linux. It is an interactive post-processing tool for scanned pages. It performs operations such as page splitting, deskewing, adding/removing borders, and others. You give it raw scans, and you get pages ready to be printed or assembled into a PDF or DJVU file.

A scanned book cover

Typical image of a scanned book without OCR

Then in order to transform images into proper texts you can use software for achieving an Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This is a method of digitizing printed texts so they can be edited, searched, stored, displayed on-line. One of the most common software to achieve OCR is Abbyy Finereader which is proprietary and available for Windows and Mac OS. There is also a free software version called Tesarac and you can use it for instance from Gscan2pdf.

Third step: Developing your catalog of e-books

You can use Calibre which a free software available for all OS and enables to catalog your books, add and download from internet related metadata (author, categories, ISBN, language, cover etc), transfer files to an e-book reader, converting formats (from emob to epub for instance), managing sub-libraries, serving books in a local network and sharing books catalogs in Internet with the [let’s share books] plugin.

Calibre screenshot

Fourth step: Finding e-books and articles online

You can use curated repositories in order to find electronic books such as:

Aaaaarg.org: An online repository with over 50,000 books and texts. It was created by the artist Sean Dockray and serves as a library for the Public School – an online platform that supports offline autodidactic activities. Website Archived here : https://archive.fo/F9V6z

UbuWeb: Is the largest non-profit online archive of avant-garde art. It was created and is co-ordinated by the artist Kenneth Goldsmith. It is a curated repository. It offers visual, concrete and sound poetry, expanding to include film and sound art mp3 archives. Website Archive here : https://web.archive.org/web/20180429151110/https://ubu.com/

Monoskop: Is a wiki, blog and a repository aggregating, documenting and mapping works, artists and intiatives related to the avant-gardes, media arts and theory and activism. Initially it focused on Eastern and Central Europe.

Memory of the world: Compiles and make available on Internet many interesting curated catalog of books using Calibre. Most of the books deal with information and communication theories, marxism, feminism, philosophy etc.

Libgen: Library Genesis is an online repository with over a million of user-contributed books and is the first project in history to offer everyone on the Internet free download of its entire book collection (as of this writing, about 15 Tb of data), together with the all metadata and code for webpages.

Wrapping up

Wrapping up, when you notice that someone asks for a book you can use ebooks repositories to find it, use Calibre to catalog that book, and use [let’s share books] to share it online. If you notice that some particular book on those repositories needs an extra care to split the double pages, or is only composed by scanned images, then you can make an OCR of it and upload it back on those repositories and/or make it available through your catalog of books.

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
-''How can I digitize books? How can I make available rare or at risk materials? Where can I find e-books? What is the best way to manage my electronic library collection? How can I make available the books and documents my organisation and/or community are compiling? How can I develop and maintain a public library that will help others to understand what we are working on? In short, how can I be a good digital librarian? If you have one or several of those questions in mind, this how-to is for you!''
+''How can I make materials rare or at risk available to others? How can I digitize books, fanzines, posters? How can I organise the printed materials my organisation and/or community are producing? Where can I find e-books? If you have one or several of those questions in mind, this how-to is for you!''
-Public Libraries can be defined as one of those universal social innovation that benefits everyone. Places where all people can get access to knowledge independent of their sociodemographic, cultural and professional characteristics. It’s one of those almost invisible infrastructures that we start to notice only once they go extinct and we begin to miss their fundamentally inclusive and distributive nature. On the other side, Internet has completely changed our expectations and imagination about a universal access to all available knowledge for every member of society. However, its emergence and development is taking place when a systemic crisis has also begun and nowadays many public libraries are either being closed down, either cannot acquire digital books from the world’s largest publishers. Moreover, for the ones that can afford to purchase e-books, many must destroy those after only twenty-six lending! This introduction of artificial scarcity into digital goods are undermining the sharing potential of libraries. Universal access to knowledge, under the form of public libraries or a neutral Internet, need to be fought for. To do so, what knowledge should be made accessible to all should be addressed by groups engaged with gender social justice and feminism.
+== Building feminist digital libraries ==
-Here we propose four steps about how to become a librarian and start with others your own digital public library. Before shaping your own work flow and choosing your tools, keep in mind that all public libraries are defined by a free access to books for every member of society, a library catalog and a librarian. With books ready to be shared, meticulously cataloged, everyone is a librarian. When everyone is librarian, libraries are everywhere.
+Public Libraries can be defined as one of those universal social innovation that benefits everyone. When truly public they can be places where all people can get access to knowledge independently of their sociodemographic, gender, cultural and professional characteristics. It’s one of those almost invisible infrastructures that we start to notice when they go extinct and we begin to miss their fundamentally inclusive and distributive nature. On the other side, Internet has completely changed our expectations and imagination about a universal access to all available knowledge for every member of society. Nowadays many public libraries are either being closed down, either cannot acquire digital books from the world’s largest publishers. Here we present four steps to become a librarian and start with others your own digital public library. Before shaping your own work flow and choosing your tools, keep in mind that public libraries are defined by a free access to books for every member of society, a catalog of books and a librarian. With books ready to be shared, meticulously cataloged, everyone is a librarian. When everyone is librarian, libraries are everywhere.
-* '''First Step: Digitizing books with a book scanner'''
+=== Case study: A feminist library on Memory of the world ===
-You can skip this step and still become a librarian and build your own public digital library. However keep in mind that your community or organization might be filled with rare documents that might disappear if they are never digitized, for instance fanzines, posters and flyers, call for actions, old books not edited anymore, local archives etc. Scanning of the book: You can use a scanner or build your own DIY bookscanner (add info)
+There are many waves into feminist thinking and its theorization. This diversity is due to an intense history of social movements and struggles for gender social justice around the world and across time. Accordingly, it can be difficult to understand the many perspectives and sometimes confronting points of views. Building and sharing catalog of books on the public domain or '''under open or free licenses''' can strength your work and activism within you communities, with your allies and the people you are trying to reach out. Public libraries support a better understanding of feminism(s) and what you stand for, your motivations, how you organise, the related (collective and historical) memories you build upon and the aesthetics and imaginaries you are shaping.
+For more information visit the [https://feminism.memoryoftheworld.org/# feminist library in Memory of the world].
-[[File:Bookscan11.jpg|thumbnail|center]] [[File:Proto1.png|thumbnail|center]]
+== Methodology ==
-* '''Second Step: Postproduction of scanned images'''
+=== First Step: Digitizing books with a book scanner ===
+You can skip this step and still become a librarian and build your own public digital library. However keep in mind that your community or organization might be filled with valuable documents that might disappear if they are never digitized, for instance fanzines, posters and flyers, call for actions, old books not edited anymore, local archives etc.
+Scanning of the book: You can use a scanner or build your own bookscanner depending of time, resources and energies.
+[[File:Proto1.png|thumbnail|[http://linearbookscanner.org/ An automatic low-cost page-turning book scanner]|center]]
+[[File:Bookscan11.jpg|thumbnail|[https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/blog/2012/10/28/our-beloved-bookscanner/ A semi automatic bookscanner build by Memory of the World]|center]]
+=== Second Step: Postproduction of scanned images ===
 You can use [http://scantailor.org/downloads/ ScanTailor] which is free software available for Windows and gnu/Linux. It is an interactive post-processing tool for scanned pages. It performs operations such as page splitting, deskewing, adding/removing borders, and others. You give it raw scans, and you get pages ready to be printed or assembled into a PDF or DJVU file.
-Then in order to transform images into proper texts you can use software for achieving an Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This is  a method of digitizing printed texts so they can be electronically edited, searched, stored, displayed on-line. One of the most common software to achieve OCR is [http://www.abbyy.com/finereader/ Abbyy Finereader] which is proprietary and available for Windows and Mac OS. There is also a free software version called Tesarac and you can use for instance [http://sourceforge.net/projects/gscan2pdf/files/gscan2pdf/ Gscan2pdf].
+[[File:Cover.jpg|250px|thumbnail|A scanned book cover|center]]
+[[File:ScannedNoOCR.png|thumbnail|Typical image of a scanned book without OCR|center]]
+Then in order to transform images into proper texts you can use software for achieving an Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This is  a method of digitizing printed texts so they can be edited, searched, stored, displayed on-line. One of the most common software to achieve OCR is [http://www.abbyy.com/finereader/ Abbyy Finereader] which is proprietary and available for Windows and Mac OS. There is also a free software version called Tesarac and you can use  it for instance from [http://sourceforge.net/projects/gscan2pdf/files/gscan2pdf/ Gscan2pdf].
+=== Third step: Developing your catalog of e-books ===
+You can use [http://calibre-ebook.com/ Calibre] which a free software available for all OS and enables to catalog your books, add and download from internet related metadata (author, categories, ISBN, language, cover etc), transfer files to an e-book reader, converting formats (from emob to epub for instance), managing sub-libraries, serving books in a local network and sharing books catalogs in Internet with the [let’s share books] plugin.
+[[File:Calibre.png|thumbnail|Calibre screenshot|center]]
+=== Fourth step: Finding e-books and articles online ===
+You can use curated repositories in order to find electronic books such as:
-* Third step: Developing your catalog of e-books
+[http://aaaaarg.org/ Aaaaarg.org]: An online repository with over 50,000 books and texts. It was created by the artist Sean Dockray and serves as a library for the Public School – an online platform that supports offline autodidactic activities. Website Archived here : https://archive.fo/F9V6z
-You can use Calibre Adding books, adding metadata (author, categories, ISBN, language etc), transfer of files to an e-book reader, converting formats and managing sub-libraries serving books in a local network sharing of books catalogs in Internet with [let’s share books] plugin
+UbuWeb: Is the largest non-profit online archive of avant-garde art. It was created and is co-ordinated by the artist Kenneth Goldsmith. It is a curated repository. It offers visual, concrete and sound poetry, expanding to include film and sound art mp3 archives. Website Archive here : https://web.archive.org/web/20180429151110/https://ubu.com/
-* Fourth step: Finding e-books and articles online
+[http://monoskop.org/ Monoskop]: Is a wiki, blog and a repository aggregating, documenting and mapping works, artists and intiatives related to the avant-gardes, media arts and theory and activism. Initially it focused on Eastern and Central Europe.
-You can use curated repositories: aaaaarg.org, Ubuweb, Monoskop, memory of the world, feminist fanzines (add) non-curated repositories: Libgen, ebook.farm
+[https://library.memoryoftheworld.org/ Memory of the world]: Compiles and make available on Internet many interesting curated catalog of books using Calibre. Most of the books deal with information and communication theories, marxism, feminism, philosophy etc.
-Wrapping up, when you notice that someone asks for a book use ebooks repositories to find the book, use Calibre to catalog that book, and use [let’s share books] to share it. If you notice that some particular book on those repositories needs an extra care to split the double pages, or is only composed by scanned images, then you can make an OCR of it and upload it back on those repositories and/or make it available through your catalog of books.
+[http://libgen.org/ Libgen]: Library Genesis is an online repository with over a million of user-contributed books and is the first project in history to offer everyone on the Internet free download of its entire book collection (as of this writing, about 15 Tb of data), together with the all metadata and code for webpages.
-'''Case study'''
+== Wrapping up ==
-A feminist library on Memory of the world
+Wrapping up, when you notice that someone asks for a book you can use ebooks repositories to find it, use [https://calibre-ebook.com/ Calibre] to catalog that book, and use [let’s share books] to share it online. If you notice that some particular book on those repositories needs an extra care to split the double pages, or is only composed by scanned images, then you can make an OCR of it and upload it back on those repositories and/or make it available through your catalog of books.
-Feminist thinking and theories are rich and diverse reflecting the intense and heterogeneous history of social movements struggles for gender social justice around the world. It is sometimes difficult to understand the many perspectives and sometimes confronting points of views. Building and sharing catalog of books under the public domain or under open or free license can help your communities, your allies and the people you are trying to reach out to better understand what you are standing for and trying to achieve. Besides that enabling decentralized and localized access to digital public libraries enable a better access for all to knowledge.
+[[Category:How_To]]
+[[Category:Resources]]