In 2024, the Internet Archive, a massively popular digital library nonprofit, removed more than 500,000 books from its Open Library catalog after losing its appeal for being sued by four U.S. publishers. The publishers argued that the Internet Archive’s lending policy used during the pandemic, in which it loaned multiple e-book copies of a single book at once, infringed on copyright law. This decision has sparked discussions on the importance and ethics of access to information, bringing free library sites — like shadow libraries — into the spotlight. What Is a Shadow Library? A shadow library is an online database of free, readily available content like books, textbooks, academic articles or other digital media. It provides access to materials that may be normally inaccessible due to paywalls or copyright conditions.
Wikipedia is a valuable resource for supporting the whole of the research process: from discovery of topics and research materials, to verifying implicit knowledge about topics, to helping researchers define or clarify information they are reading in their work. In a number of research contexts, readers have developed a research habit to check Wikipedia on a regular basis to clarify knowledge about new topics they encounter in reading. Research situations where readers are forced to leave the platform of their choice to find more information make it hard for readers to continue to stay focused within the research ecosystem. To take advantage of reference content, like Wikipedia, often means bringing Wikipedia to the reader, where they are. Fortunately, the way Wikipedia is licensed makes is quite easy, free, and legal to reuse content within other web applications to streamline the research process (for example Google Knowledge Graph or in Facebook's Community pages). For libraries and publishers there is a real advantage to integrating Wikipedia content throughout lib-guides, search and discovery tools, journal articles, and other websites—to supplement the carefully created and curated professional and academic resources. Bringing the Wikipedia content into ones platform helps keep readers within it, while bringing them relevant, accessible contextual material that supports their research needs. With all of these advantages, it is also important to consider how to embed Wikipedia in a way that reciprocates value to the Wikimedia community: Wikipedia's nonprofit mission, serving free and open knowledge, relies on collaborative partnerships amongst readers, editors, and organizations, to help pay for developers, write our content, and support volunteers. If you want to include Wikipedia in your research platform, we invite you to reciprocate that service with some of the following strategies.
Trove is a collaboration between the National Library of Australia and hundreds of Partner organisations around Australia. Search Trove to explore amazing collections from Australian libraries, universities, museums, galleries and archives. It’s free and available online all day, every day.
Looking for a fun tech project for you, your club or your classroom? Explore Make-IT Place, a unique virtual maker space, and learn how to: Make a Raspberry Pi webserver Design your own 3D keychain with Tinkercad Create an animated sprite in Piskel Use Scratch to program an interactive game * And more! You'll find bite-sized lessons and videos created by a community of makers that present easy STEM projects in a step-by-step, moderated online environment. Make-IT Place offers a safe, secure online community exchange of ideas, lesson plans and activities to increase technology literacy for users of all ages across Maryland. Jump in and see what you can do!
The “Library Map of Vermont” was created in 1914 to track all 225 brick and mortar libraries as well as 267 traveling library stations around the state. In this episode we’ll ask; Can a map truly show what it means for a community to have a well-supported library… and when communities lack that?
The prevalence of textbook affordability and OER initiatives at ARL libraries - ScienceDirect
Textbook affordability programs and the promotion of OER are well-established priorities for many academic libraries, but few studies have examined the prevalence of such programs either in general or across institution types. This paper presents the results of a study designed to gather information about textbook affordability initiatives at university libraries that are members Association of Research Libraries. It uses information from the publicly available websites of ARL libraries in the United States to determine how many of those institutions maintain textbook affordability programs, with those figures further broken down by status (public/private) and membership in the Open Education Network. In addition, the findings reveal some notable characteristics of textbook affordability programs, including an overall lack of visibility on institutional websites, a marked variety in financial incentives, and evidence of programs that have been discontinued.
CAIELI is a collaboration between Libraries & Cultural Resources and Werklund School of Education. This transdisciplinary student-focused initiative aims to encourage effective and ethical use of AI on campus. CAIELI is a collaboration between Libraries & Cultural Resources and Werklund School of Education. This transdisciplinary student-focused initiative aims to encourage effective and ethical use of AI on campus. The Centre’s innovative programs harness the power of AI to personalize learning and empower students to excel. We aim to cultivate strong digital and information literacy skills that will pave the way for academic success across disciplines. Libraries co-leading the way!
There’s significant research on the role of open education in higher education, as well as well-known uses of open educational resources (OER) in primary and secondary education. Whole journals and conferences are dedicated to the subject, and at colleges and universities, libraries play a key role in OER initiatives on campuses. Last fall, Library Futures began asking ourselves why public libraries haven’t been involved in these conversations about OER. The question of what, if any, role OER could or should play in public libraries started with a small online event, which turned into a blog post, which turned into a research study to establish a baseline of awareness and interest on the topic. This presentation, delivered today at OER24 in Cork, Ireland, presents brief preliminary findings from this US-based study.
A place-based initiative in Westchester County brought to you by Metropolitan New York Library Council. The Library Field is a place to deepen our relationships—between institutions, communities, and individuals—and the earth. By probing the ways that we choose to observe, record, organize, access, and preserve the natural world, we have the opportunity to think critically about our role in natural systems and advance the field of librarianship.
Arabic Collections Online (ACO) is a publicly available digital library of public domain Arabic language content. ACO currently provides digital access to 17,699 volumes across 10,473 subjects drawn from rich Arabic collections of distinguished research libraries. Established with support from NYU Abu Dhabi, and currently supported by major grants from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, and Carnegie Corporation of New York, this mass digitization project aims to feature up to 23,000 volumes from the library collections of NYU and partner institutions. These institutions are contributing published books in all fields—literature, business, science, and more—from their Arabic language collections.
A project from the Digital Public Library, that uses geolocation to provide readers access to digital versions of books that have been locally banned. Last year, thousands of books were banned at libraries, schools and universities. OUR MISSION IS TO PROVIDE ANYONE WHO IS IN A LIBRARY THAT HAS BANNED A BOOK ACCESS TO THE DIGITAL VERSION FOR FREE. OUR MISSION IS TO PROVIDE ANYONE WHO IS IN A LIBRARY THAT HAS BANNED A BOOK ACCESS TO THE DIGITAL VERSION FOR FREE. Every time a book is banned from a library, we're going to help put it right back. Every time a book is banned from a library, we're going to help put it right back.Every time a book is banned from a library, we're going to help put it right back.
In the Library with the Lead Pipe is an open access, open peer-reviewed journal founded and run by a team of librarians working in various types of libraries. In addition to publishing articles and editorials by Editorial Board members, Lead Pipe publishes articles by authors representing diverse perspectives including educators, administrators, library support staff, technologists, and community members. Lead Pipe believes libraries and library workers can change the world for the better. We improve libraries, professional organizations, and their communities of practice by exploring new ideas, starting conversations, documenting our concerns, and arguing for solutions. In the Library with the Lead Pipe is an open access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or their institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. This is in accordance with the BOAI definition of open access.
Open Education Librarianship Certificate - Open Education Network
The Certificate in Open Education Librarianship is a structured and supportive professional development opportunity preparing librarians like you to champion open education. Guided by our expert mentors, you’ll hone critical skills, gain insight, and transform your librarianship into a catalyst for open education, all while working within a collaborative cohort of your peers.
Library Futures: Championing the Right to Equitable Access to Knowledge
We tackle the cutting-edge issues around technology and access to information that other library organizations are slow to address, mobilizing a community of experts to encourage the adoption of technologies that uplift libraries in the digital age. A project of The Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy at NYU Law.
Wikidata:WikiProject Linked Data for Production/Practical Wikidata for Librarians - Wikidata
Practical Wikidata for Librarians arose from a group of librarians and archivists at the Blacklight-LD working meeting at Stanford in September 2019 (notes available). The goal of the group is to gather together, organize, and expand resources for librarians interested in editing Wikidata, and to provide a space to develop shared data models and best practices. The hope is that sharing these resources will prevent duplicative work at different institutions, and provide stepping stones for librarians interested in working with Wikidata but seeking some direction on where to get started.
One web page for every book ever published. It's a lofty but achievable goal. To build Open Library, we need hundreds of millions of book records, a wiki interface, and lots of people who are willing to contribute their time and effort to building the site. To date, we have gathered over 20 million records from a variety of large catalogs as well as single contributions, with more on the way. Open Library is an open project: the software is open, the data are open, the documentation is open, and we welcome your contribution. Whether you fix a typo, add a book, or write a widget--it's all welcome. We have a small team of fantastic programmers who have accomplished a lot, but we can't do it alone!
National Emergency Library : Free Texts : Free Download, Borrow and Streaming : Internet Archive
a collection of books that supports emergency remote teaching, research activities, independent scholarship, and intellectual stimulation while universities, schools, training centers, and libraries are closed.
Open Peeps is a hand-drawn illustration library to create scenes of people. You can use them in product illustration, marketing, comics, product states, user flows, personas, storyboarding, or whatever you want! The library works like building blocks made of vector arms, legs, and emotions. You can mix these elements to create different Peeps. Creating a character is easy! Use any product design tool like Sketch, Figma, XD, or Studio to mix nested components. There are over 584,688 possible combinations (yup, someone did the math!) Combine clothing and hairstyles to add flair. Change emotion with different facial expressions. Set the scene with different poses—including standing and sitting by Pablo Stanley, Free for commercial and personal use under CC0 License.
vis.js - A dynamic, browser based visualization library.
A dynamic, browser based visualization library. The library is designed to be easy to use, to handle large amounts of dynamic data, and to enable manipulation of and interaction with the data. The library consists of the components DataSet, Timeline, Network, Graph2d and Graph3d.
You may think that anything uploaded onto the internet is there forever—but the constant churn is a challenge to the archivists trying to backup the web.
Libraries.io gathers data from 33 package managers and 3 source code repositories. We track over 2.4m unique open source projects, 25m repositories and 85m interdependencies between them. This gives Libraries.io a unique understanding of open source software. An understanding that we want to share with you. This page contains information on how to download, use and redistribute data from Libraries.io.
Wanderway is an open online course created for small non-profits, artists, and creative small businesses. It will teach you how to experiment with digital engagement when you are strapped for time and resources. It will also guide you through exploring the emotions and ethics behind digital work. It was made for individuals, conference buddies, teams, boards, and even entire organizations across the non-profit world. It’s free, unfacilitated, and entirely online. You can go at your own pace, or be led through a series of email reminders and prompts. You don’t even need to login to access content.
IMSLP/Petrucci Music Library: Free Public Domain Sheet Music
IMSLP stands for the International Music Score Library Project and was started in 2006. The logo on the main page is a capital letter A. It was taken from the beginning of the very first printed book of music, the Harmonice Musices Odhecaton. It was published in Venice in 1501 by Ottaviano Petrucci, the library's namesake.
