This review was an invited review of Joe Karaganis, ed., Shadow Libraries: Access to Knowledge in Global Higher Education (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018). Joe and I were and remain colleagues (we co-founded Open Syllabus and heads it up, while I serve on its board). I disclosed the potential conflict of interest to the journal, Publishing Research Quarterly; they felt that my deep knowledge of the interlocking fields — based on decades of experience, including ICANN, Banff, EFF, Yale Law School (where I was a visiting fellow 2008–2010) and NYU (visiting scholar (2014–2015), and advocacy efforts — far outweighed any concerns.
Review of Shadow Libraries: Access to Knowledge in Global Higher Education
(MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2018)
Publishing Research Quarterly (22 October 2018) link
As higher education has morphed from a gaggle of peculiar, sometimes-hidebound institutions into a more standardized, globalized format — a sort of industry of industries — its primary product, knowledge, has become increasingly financialized. The consequences vary widely, ranging from rising tuition fees to the relentless measuring of every aspect of learning environments. But one is fairly universal: the skyrocketing cost of the materials needed to teach, learn, and research. Universities are famously fractious, so collective action can be difficult, and it often happens on the margins of the institutions. Joe Karaganis’s edited volume, Shadow Libraries: Access to Knowledge in Global Higher Education, tackles a key area where collective responses have seen stunning successes: the rise of alternative, often illegal resources for sharing publications.
In the simplest terms, these so-called “shadow libraries” are informal collection of digitized publications suited to the needs of particular reading communities. In the internet era, though, the word community has been much-abused. Though it hearkens back to the authenticity of face-to-face social groups, it is often used to describe something very different, sprawling networks of people share little more than a login for a website. Unsurprisingly, shadow libraries reflect this tension. The communities they serve can be as small as a university department or even a single course, or as large as entire nations or even global regions. But they do have one thing in common: making access to publications more equitable — or, as they say, free. Sometimes this is a convenient way for harried academics to circumvent clunky institutional mechanisms for limiting access, but in other cases — particularly in less developed regions of the world, where institutional budgets are no match for the first-world prices of many publications — there is no alternative.
Shadow libraries are to shadows what cloud computing is to clouds. If cloud computing is a diffuse metaphor for other people’s computers, then shadow libraries are other people’s libraries. Who those other people are is a vexed question, because it hinges on the conflict over who should “own” the collected materials — the producers, a category that lumps together everything from lone authors to publishing empires like Elsevier and Springer, or the consumers, who often are involved in producing the knowledge that libraries maintain. This is a moral conflict, but it often takes legal form, so the identity of these shadow librarians is mostly shrouded in mystery for practical reasons — avoiding civil penalties, criminal prosecution, or even political persecution.
Shadow Libraries lays out these issues with remarkable clarity and in surprising detail. Karaganis’s introduction is a fine example of the genre. It provides a comprehensive overview that balances a schematic analysis, which tends to cast these developments in intellectual-property terms, with a broad historical background, in which they appear more as issues of social and economic justice. (In itself, the introduction would be an excellent text to prompt reflexive classroom discussions well-suited to the social turn seen on many campuses.) The eight contributed essays present a variety of rich historical narratives that describe how these issues have played out in different ways in specific national contexts on four continents and even more decades. These essays provide a panoramic, at times almost cinematic view of how academic cultures have navigated and negotiated conflicts over access, often through periods of catastrophic political change. They show clearly how what seems like a generically “digital” phenomenon — basically, sharing PDFs and the like — is only the most recent phase in much older political, economic, and cultural struggles that centered on print rather than electronic documents. Together, the essays offer a healthy reminder that, not so long ago, for many people living under repressive regimes the seemingly simple act of transcribing or photocopying certain texts could involve terrible risks — of imprisonment or disappearance for individuals, and of raids and purges for institutions.
But the flipside of state repression is social activity, and this is where Shadow Libraries stands apart from many anthologies that address intellectual property in various contexts. The book draws on Karaganis’s work over decades to understand (depending on who you talk with) sharing or piracy not in top-down monolithic legal terms, which reduce myriad forms of knowledge to “content,” but instead as a bottom-up local phenomenon. Users in the Soviet Union, Argentina, or South Africa may use the same browsers to click through the same links to download the same PDFs, but how and why they read them — what those texts mean — is steeped in worlds we think of in very different terms: samizdat, dirty wars, and Apartheid. By connecting the shadow libraries of the internet to these deeper histories, the collected essays convey the variety, subtlety, and flexibility of ways that academic communities and the larger publics they are embedded in have accommodated and negotiated with state power. And the range of qualitative and quantitative methods they use provide outstanding models for ways to articulate what John Seely Brown once called, both naively and brilliantly, “the social life of information.” Hopefully, this book will prompt and inform further work devoted to regions undergoing dramatic change that Shadow Libraries does not cover — East Asia, the Middle East, and northern Africa.