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

From Gender and Tech Resources

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'''Case study: Memory of the world '''
 
'''Case study: Memory of the world '''
  
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.
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Feminist thinking and theories are rich reflecting the diversity and intense history of social movements struggles for gender social justice around the world. Accordingly, it can be difficult to understand the many perspectives and sometimes confronting points of views. Building and sharing catalog of books under the public domain or distributed under open or free licenses can help your communities, your allies and the people you are trying to reach out to better understand what you are standing for and the motivations behind what you trying to achieve. Moreover enabling decentralized and localized access to public libraries enable a better access for all to knowledge.
  
 
'''Methodology'''
 
'''Methodology'''
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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)
 
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)
  
[[File:Bookscan11.jpg|thumbnail|center]] [[File:Proto1.png|thumbnail|center]]
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[[File:Bookscan11.jpg|thumbnail|center]]  
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[https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/blog/2012/10/28/our-beloved-bookscanner/ A semi automatic bookscanner build by Memory of the World]
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[[File:Proto1.png|thumbnail|center]]
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[http://linearbookscanner.org/ An automatic low-cost page-turning book scanner]
  
 
* '''Second Step: Postproduction of scanned images'''
 
* '''Second Step: Postproduction of scanned images'''

Revision as of 16:00, 8 May 2015

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!

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.

Case study: Memory of the world

Feminist thinking and theories are rich reflecting the diversity and intense history of social movements struggles for gender social justice around the world. Accordingly, it can be difficult to understand the many perspectives and sometimes confronting points of views. Building and sharing catalog of books under the public domain or distributed under open or free licenses can help your communities, your allies and the people you are trying to reach out to better understand what you are standing for and the motivations behind what you trying to achieve. Moreover enabling decentralized and localized access to public libraries enable a better access for all to knowledge.

Methodology

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.

  • 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 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)

Bookscan11.jpg

A semi automatic bookscanner build by Memory of the World

Proto1.png

An automatic low-cost page-turning book scanner

  • 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.

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 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 Gscan2pdf.

  • Third step: Developing your catalog of e-books

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

  • Fourth step: Finding e-books and articles online

You can use curated repositories: aaaaarg.org, Ubuweb, Monoskop, memory of the world, feminist fanzines (add) non-curated repositories: Libgen, ebook.farm

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.