Presented at
DEF CON 32 (2024),
Aug. 10, 2024, 3 p.m.
(45 minutes).
The public library is under attack. Calls for book banning are at an all time high. Some states have passed laws that hold librarians legally accountable for offering "unacceptable" materials to minors. But before this fire started, another one was already burning. In an era of digital content, from eBooks to streaming movies, public libraries have been forced to accept draconian terms of service at the expense of their patrons and to the benefit of corporations. Grossly inflated eBook prices and licensing, unobtainable materials that went out of print due to artificial scarcity, exorbitant fees for access to academic research; these are just a few of the myriad of ways that libraries have been forced to bow before capitalism, all because of a desire to serve the public. But we can fight back...
And no one says we need to fight fairly.
I’d like to tell you some real life stories of a public librarian with a quasi-legal, dark grey skillset. And I’d love to share some ideas about what you can do to help others. If I can do this, you can. And anyone can be a shadow librarian.
1. Bodó, Balázs, Dániel Antal, and Zoltán Puha. “Can Scholarly Pirate Libraries Bridge the Knowledge Access Gap? An Empirical Study on the Structural Conditions of Book Piracy in Global and European Academia.” Edited by Sergi Lozano. PLOS ONE 15, no. 12 (December 3, 2020): e0242509. [link](https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0242509).
2. Böök, Mikael. “Herding the Wind,” 2020. [link](http://www.kaapeli.fi/book/libpub/Z-Library_en.pdf).
3. Brown, Elizabeth Nolon. “You Can’t Stop Pirate Libraries.” Reason, 2022. [link](https://reason.com/2022/07/24/you-cant-stop-pirate-libraries/).
4. Complutense, Francisco Segado-Bo, Juan Martín-Quevedo, and Juan-José Prieto-Gutiérrez. “Jumping over the Paywall: Strategies and Motivations for Scholarly Piracy and Other Alternatives.” Accessed January 4, 2024. [link](https://doi.org/10.1177/02666669221144429).
5. Gardner, Gabriel J, Stephen R McLaughlin, and Andrew D Asher. “Shadow Libraries and You: Sci-Hub Usage and the Future of ILL.” ACRL 2017, Baltimore, Maryland, March 22 - 25, 2017. [Conference Paper], 2017. [link](http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12680/cr56n622s).
6. Yesberg, Helen. “Libraries, Piracy and the Grey Area In-Between: Free Digital Media during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Reinvention: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research 15, no. 1 (April 29, 2022). [link](https://doi.org/10.31273/reinvention.v15i1.799).
Presenters:
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Daniel Messer
Dan is a systems librarian and SQL hacker living in Alvaton and Louisville, Kentucky. After almost 30 years of library work, he’s cultivated a broad background in public library circulation methodology, library technology and automation, training and instruction, and library databases. A shadow librarian for ten years, he’s provided cataloguing and scanning for various shadow libraries and online digital collections. And he’s called upon his work in shadow libraries to help patrons as a traditional public librarian.
Beyond the library, he’s an author, podcaster, musician, and coder.
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