Shadow libraries are online databases of readily available content that is normally obscured or otherwise not readily accessible. Such content may be inaccessible for a number of reasons, including the use of paywalls, copyright controls, or other barriers to accessibility placed upon the content by its original owners.[1][2] Shadow libraries usually consist of textual information as in electronic books, but may also include other digital media, including software, music, or films.
Examples of shadow libraries include Anna's Archive, Library Genesis, Sci-Hub and Z-Library, which are popular book and academic shadow libraries[1][3] and may be the largest public libraries for books and literature.
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Shadow copies
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How to Create Daily Shadow Copy of your Files in Windows 10 [Tutorial]
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Sure Cuts A Lot SCAL5 - How to Shadow
Transcription
In this section I will look at the shadow copy service. The shadow copy service works with your regular backups to provide additional restore options that the users can access without having to go through your helpdesk. The shadow copy service works by taking a snapshot of your data according to a schedule. The advantage of this over a regular backup is that you can run shadow copies when users are most likely to be changing or adding files. With traditional backups, the backup is usually run overnight. If the user was to accidentally delete a file during the day that was created that day, the file would be lost because the backup had not run yet. Shadow copies are very fast because they only save changes and work at the block level. When a file is first saved or modified, the shadow copy service needs to takes a complete copy of the file. The file is copied to the shadow copy area, this can be an area on the same hard drive as the files or a completely separate hard drive dedicated to shadow copies. Once there is a complete copy of the file in the shadow copy area, after this only changes need to be saved into the shadow copy area. When other files are modified or created in the file system these files are also copied to the shadow copy area. Shadow copies use an first in first out system. As soon as the shadow copy areas is full, the oldest file in the shadow copy area gets removed to allow for new files. The more hard drive space you allocate for shadow copies the more revisions of each file you can store. Shadow copies were first introduced in Windows server 2003. In Windows server 2003 shadow copies only worked on the share level. With Windows server 2008, shadow copies now work on the volume level. They are a number of different ways that you can get into the settings to configure shadow copies. One method is to open Windows Explorer and then go to the hard drive you want to configure shadow copies for, right clicking it and then selecting the option configure shadow copies. You can also access shadow copies by selecting properties for the hard drive. If you go into the properties for the hard drive, all you need to do is select the tab shadow copies to access the settings for shadow copies. From shadow copy configuration, you could select the option enable to enable shadow copies, however it is best that you do not enable shadow copies until you have configured it by pressing the button settings. This is because, once you enable shadow copies there are some settings you cannot change unless you disable shadow copies and in the process delete any existing shadow copies. If I now go into the settings section, firstly I can set which hard drive the shadow copies will be stored on. For best performance you should always store the shadow copies on their own hard disk. If you’re using a dedicated hard disk you may want to consider setting the maximum size for the shadow copies to no limit. In this particular case the shadow copies are sharing the C drive with the operating system, so therefore I will set a limit on how much hard drive space the shadow copies can use. Without a limit on the amount of hard drive space shadow copies can use, shadow copies will used all the free space on the hard drive and may cause problems with other services on the computer. How often shadow copies run is determined by a schedule. To access the schedule, press the schedule button and you’ll see by default two shadow copies will be run Monday through Friday twice a day. If I want to add additional schedules I can do this by pressing the new button. Once the schedule has been added I can adjust the start time below. How often you run the shadow copy service on your server really depends on how much data is changing on your server. A server with a lot of hard disk IO’s, for example if you are running a database server on it, it is not recommended to schedule a lot of shadow copies as this will reduce the performance of the server. If however, you are running a file server in which there are a lot of files which do not change often and files are been added quite regularly, I would recommend running more shadow copies. Remember that if a user creates and deletes the file and the shadow copy service has not run, the file is lost forever. If I now accept these two dialogs and go back to the properties for shadow copies, you will notice that the enable button is grayed out. Remember this important fact when configuring settings for shadow copies. When you change the settings for shadow copies, shadow copies are automatically enabled. If I press the button create now, the shadow copy service will create a snapshot for use with the shadow copy service. To demonstrate shadow copies better, if I navigate to the documents folder you will see that I have created two files. If I open the data file you will notice that it has the text original which I will now change to modified. The second file I have called delete me. Before I can delete the file it needs to be modified. Once it is modified the shadow copy service will take a copy of it next time it runs. Now that changes have been made to the hard drive the shadow copy service needs to run again to record the changes that have been made. I could wait for the next scheduled shadow copy to run but I will instead go into shadow copies and run another manual shadow copy. Once the shadow copy is complete, I will remove the file delete me to demonstrate how shadow copies can retrieve files that have been deleted from the hard disk. Remember, unless a file is created or modified between runs of the shadow copy, it will not be copied by shadow copy. If you had a file on your server that has not been modified for some time, since shadow copies uses a first in, first out system, it will most likely no longer have a copy of the file. You can see why shadow copies are not a replacement of regular backups. Once the shadow copy is complete, I can now go into Windows Explorer and right-click on the file and select the option previous versions. If I select the button down the bottom open, I can see what is contained in the file. You can see here that this is the original version of the file, however this is a read-only copy. If I do not wish to overwrite the original file I can select the option copy. If I am 100% sure that I want to restore the file I can select the option restore which will restore this version of the file over the original one. To restore the deleted file there is no file that I can right-click on and select restore previous versions. To restore the deleted file I need to instead right-click on the folder and select the option restore previous versions. If I select open I can see all the files that were saved with that restore point. The snapshot of the previous versions appears as Read-only files in Windows Explorer. As you can see, I can move the previous versions Windows down to show the other explorer window and then drag-and-drop the delete a file from one window to the other. It’s important to note here that if I had deleted the file by sending it to the recycle bin, it would not appear in previous versions but I could however restore the file from the recycle bin. This concludes shadow copies, as you can see shadow copies are easy to set up and use. Since shadow copies are block-based they are very fast but are subject to disk tools like defragmentation. Also shadow copies are not a good choice for hard drives with high I/O for example database servers. Shadow copies are a better choice for file servers. The more space you allocate for shadow copies means the more revisions that you can store on your server, but remember, shadow copies are not a replacement for regular backups. Set up correctly, shadow copies can help take some of the burden off administrator’s by allowing end-users to restore their own files.
Motivation
One of the goals of shadow libraries is to more readily disseminate academic content, especially papers from academic journals.[2] Academic literature has become increasingly expensive, as costs to access information created by scholars have risen dramatically in recent years, especially the cost of books.[4] The term serials crisis has emerged to describe this ongoing trend.
There has also been a concerted international movement, known as the Open Access movement, to make academic knowledge free or very inexpensive.[5] The Open Access movement strives to establish both journals that are free to access (known as open access journals) and free-to-access repositories of academic journal papers published elsewhere. However, many open access journals require academics to pay fees to be published in an open access journal, which disincentives academics from publishing in such journals.[6]
A third reason for the establishment of shadow libraries is the tacit endorsement by many academics of such efforts.[7] Academics are rarely compensated by publishers for their work, regardless of whether their work is published in an open access journal or a conventionally priced journal. Thus, there is now little incentive for academics to disavow shadow libraries. Furthermore, shadow libraries greatly increase the impact of academics whose work is made available. According to one study from Cornell University, articles that are on Sci-Hub receive 1.72 times as many citations as articles from journals of similar quality that are not available on Sci-Hub.[8]
Legal status
Content hosted by some shadow libraries may be hosted without the consent of the original owners of the material. This may make some shadow libraries illegal; however, as researchers are not required to disclose the means by which they access academic material, it is difficult to monitor the use of illegally accessed academic papers. Not all authors agree with trying to compromise access to shadow libraries.[9]
The legality of directing individuals to shadow libraries is broadly undetermined. There is currently no consensus among legal authorities in the United States and Europe as to what extent advertising shadow libraries constitutes a criminal offense. There are currently no settled cases determining whether it is permissible by academics to directly provide links to shadow libraries, though threats of legal action by academic publishers regarding such references have occurred in isolated incidents. Legal action against researchers remains uncommon.[10]
Although most academics are not penalized for distributing their published works independently and freely (therefore obviating the need for shadow libraries in the first place), there are reports of academic publishers threatening such academics with legal action.[11]
Used resilience technologies
Shadow libraries (or their content databases) make use of BitTorrent (mainly for database dumps), dark web and IPFS technologies to increase their resilience or distribute loads.[12][13][14][15][16] In the case of Anna's Archive, the software is developed and made accessible as open source software, enabling code development by any volunteer and mirrors or forks, with the site claiming that "if we get taken down we'll just pop right up elsewhere, since all our code and data is fully open source".[17][18]
See also
References
- ^ a b Karaganis, Joe, ed. (2018). Shadow Libraries: Access to Knowledge in Global Higher Education. The MIT Press. doi:10.7551/mitpress/11339.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-262-34569-9. Archived from the original on 2021-07-02. Retrieved 2020-09-23.
- ^ a b Woodcock, Claire (November 30, 2022). "'Shadow Libraries' Are Moving Their Pirated Books to The Dark Web After Fed Crackdowns - Academic repositories like LibGen and Z-Library are becoming less accessible on the web, but finding a home on alt-networks like Tor and IPFS". Vice. Archived from the original on November 30, 2022. Retrieved November 30, 2022.
- ^ Van der Sar, Ernesto (November 19, 2022). ""Anna's Archive" Opens the Door to Z-Library and Other Pirate Libraries". TorrentFreak. Archived from the original on November 19, 2022. Retrieved January 3, 2023.
- ^ "Trends in the Price of Academic Titles in the Humanities and Other Fields". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Archived from the original on 2021-04-20. Retrieved 2021-02-15.
- ^ "Schattenbibliotheken: Piraterie oder Notwendigkeit?". iRights – Kreativität und Urheberrecht in der digitalen Welt (in German). Archived from the original on 2021-07-02. Retrieved 2020-09-23.
- ^ Suber, Peter (2013-10-21). "Open access: six myths to put to rest". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Archived from the original on 2021-02-20. Retrieved 2021-02-15.
- ^ "Shadow Libraries – The Piracy Years". Archived from the original on 2021-07-02. Retrieved 2021-02-15.
- ^ Correa, Juan C.; Laverde-Rojas, Henry; Tejada, Julian; Marmolejo-Ramos, Fernando (January 2022). "The Sci-Hub effect on papers' citations". Scientometrics. 127 (1): 99–126. doi:10.1007/s11192-020-03806-w. S2CID 234003081. Archived from the original on 26 July 2023. Retrieved 26 July 2023.
- ^ Rumfitt, Alison (November 25, 2022). "In defence of Z-Library and book piracy - Pirated ebook site Z-Library was the bane of many authors' and publishers' existence, however Alison Rumitt – herself an author – isn't celebrating its loss". Dazed. Archived from the original on November 25, 2022. Retrieved November 25, 2022.
- ^ "Legal questions raised over links to Sci-Hub". www.insidehighered.com. Archived from the original on 2023-01-10. Retrieved 2021-02-14.
- ^ "What happened when a professor was accused of sharing his own work on his website". Archived from the original on 2022-05-14. Retrieved 2021-02-15.
- ^ "Meet the Guy Behind the Libgen Torrent Seeding Movement". TorrentFreak. Archived from the original on 13 May 2021. Retrieved 23 October 2020.
- ^ "Archivists Want to Make Sci-Hub 'Un-Censorable'". Gizmodo. Archived from the original on 25 December 2022. Retrieved 13 June 2021.
- ^ ""Anna's Archive" Opens the Door to Z-Library and Other Pirate Libraries". TorrentFreak. Archived from the original on 19 November 2022. Retrieved 8 January 2023.
- ^ "'Shadow Libraries' Are Moving Their Pirated Books to The Dark Web After Fed Crackdowns". VICE. Archived from the original on 30 November 2022. Retrieved 8 January 2023.
- ^ "A piece of Web3 tech helps banned books through the Great Firewall's cracks". South China Morning Post. 16 April 2022. Archived from the original on 29 November 2022. Retrieved 8 January 2023.
- ^ Staff (January 2023). "Anna's Archive - About". Anna's Archive. Retrieved January 3, 2022.
- ^ Staff (January 2023). "Anna's Archive - Software". Anna's Archive. Archived from the original on January 17, 2023. Retrieved January 4, 2022.
This page was last edited on 10 April 2024, at 18:08