Dilip Simeon's blog

Three publishing giants - Elseiver, Wiley, and American Chemical Society - have recently filed a lawsuit in India to block SciHub and LibGen, which are widely used portals that provide free access to academic articles, many of which lie behind expensive paywalls. Millions of students in India and other countries use these digital libraries to stay connected to circuits of global research. The case will be heard in court on February 23, 2021. In anticipation of the hearing, please consider signing this petition , both, urging the publishers to withdraw the lawsuit, and the Delhi High Court to stand against the extortionate practices of publishing companies who are profiting off the unpaid labour of the global scholarly community and impeding the free-flow of knowledge and innovation. We request you to share the petition in your networks and on social media, tagging @WileyGlobal, @AmerChemSociety, and @ElsevierConnect, and using the hashtags #KnowledgeOverProfit, #ScholarsAgainstPaywal...

At 73, P.V. Chinnathambi runs one of the loneliest libraries in the forested wilderness of Kerala’s Idukki district. Its 160-books - all classics - are regularly borrowed, read, and returned by poor, Muthavan Adivasis  A library? Here in the forests and wilderness of Idukki district? This is a low literacy spot in Kerala, India’s most literate state. There are just 25 families in this hamlet of the state’s first elected tribal village council. Anyone else wanting to borrow a book from here would have to trek a long way through dense forest. Would they, really? “Well, yes,” says P.V. Chinnathambi, 73, tea vendor, sports club organiser and librarian. “They do.” His little shop - selling tea, ‘mixture', biscuits, matches and other provisions - sits at the hilly crossroads of Edamalakudi. This is Kerala’s remotest panchayat, where just one Adivasi group, the Muthavans, resides. Getting there had meant an 18-kilometre walk from Pettimudi near Munnar. Reaching Chinnathambi’s tea-s...

The remains of the oldest public library in  Germany , a building erected almost two millennia ago that may have housed up to 20,000 scrolls, have been discovered in the middle of Cologne. The walls were first uncovered in 2017, during an excavation on the grounds of a Protestant church in the centre of the city. Archaeologists knew they were of Roman origins, with Cologne being one of Germany’s oldest cities, founded by the Romans in 50 AD under the name Colonia. But the discovery of niches in the walls, measuring approximately 80cm by 50cm, was, initially, mystifying. “It took us some time to match up the parallels – we could see the niches were too small to bear statues inside. But what they are are kind of cupboards for the scrolls,” said Dr Dirk Schmitz from the Roman-Germanic Museum of Cologne. “They are very particular to libraries – you can see the same ones in the library at Ephesus.” It is not clear how many scrolls the library would have held, but it would h...

The public library is a part of these invisible infrastructures that we start to notice only once they begin to disappear. A utopian dream - about the place from which every human being will have access to every piece of available knowledge that can be collected - looked impossible for a long time, until the egalitarian impetus of social revolutions, the Enlightenment idea of universality of knowledge, and the exceptional suspension of the commercial barriers to access to knowledge made it possible. The Internet has... completely changed our expectations and imagination about what is possible. The dream of a catalogue of the world – a universal approach to all available knowledge for every member of society – became realizable. Library Genesis, Aaaaarg.org, Monoskop, UbuWeb are all examples of fragile knowledge infrastructures built and maintained by brave librarians practicing civil disobedience which the world of researchers in the humanities rely on....

The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges By this art you may contemplate the variations of the 23 letters... The Anatomy of Melancholy, part 2, sect. II, mem. IV The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal bookcase. One of the free sides leads to a narrow hallway which opens onto another gallery, identical to the first and to all the rest. To the left and right of the hallway there are two very small closets. In the first, one may sleep standing up; in the other, satisfy one's fecal necessities. Also through here pass...

The caretaker stares at the wrought iron door and its four ancient locks with a gleam in his eyes. Outside, the Moroccan sun shines down upon the ornate coloured tiles of Khizanat al-Qarawiyyin, located in the  old medina of Fez . This, it is widely believed, is the oldest library in the world – and soon it will be open to the general public again. “It was like healing wounds,” says Aziza Chaouni, a Fez native and the architect tasked with restoring the great library. The iron door is found along a corridor that once linked the library with the neighbouring Qarawiyyin Mosque – the two centres of learning and cultural life in old Fez. Inside it were kept the most prized tomes in the collection; works of such immense import that each of the four locks had separate keys held with four different individuals, all of whom had to be present for the door to be opened. The restored library boasts a new sewerage and underground canal system to drain away the moisture that had thre...

NB:  The argument about capitalism is wide open.  Why Socialism? Albert Einstein  and t here is no better place to start than to question the vicious control of reading material, especially thought-provoking books and articles by rapacious corporate houses. Knowledge should be free and widely available. Lib-gen and Sci-Hub deserve global support and gratitude - DS http://custodians.online/ A Letter in solidarity with Library genesis and Sci-Hub In Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s tale the Little Prince meets a businessman who accumulates stars with the sole purpose of being able to buy more stars. The Little Prince is perplexed. He owns only a flower, which he waters every day. Three volcanoes, which he cleans every week. “It is of some use to my volcanoes, and it is of some use to my flower, that I own them,” he says, “but you are of no use to the stars that you own”. There are many businessmen who own knowledge today. Consider Elsevier, the l...

Isis militants have reportedly ransacked Mosul library, burning over a hundred thousand rare manuscripts and documents spanning centuries of human learning. Initial reports said approximately 8,000 books were destroyed by the extremist group. However,  AL RAI ’s chief international correspondent Elijah J. Magnier told  The Independent  that a Mosul library official believes as many as 112, 709 manuscripts and books, some of which were registered on a UNESCO rarities list, are among those lost.  Mosul Public Library’s director Ghanim al-Ta’an said Isis militants then demolished the building using explosive devices. “People tried to prevent the terrorist group elements from burning the library, but failed,” a local source told  IraqiNews.com . READ MORE:  MILITANTS KIDNAP UP TO 90 ASSYRIAN CHRISTIANS ASSYRIAN CHRISTIAN MILITIA KEEP WELL-ARMED MILITANTS AT BAY Other reports indicated that Isis militants later broke into the library and cons...

NB: In the absence of any assurance that files of historical value will be preserved or even vetted before being destroyed, ( "a sked if these files of historic value were saved or junked, an official expressed ignorance" ),  all those who respect knowledge and historical research have cause to be gravely alarmed at this news. This is particularly so in light of the attempt of the previous NDA government, under AB Vajpayee, to tamper with Mahatma Gandhi's Collected Works (see more on this below). As also the Gujarat governments actions with regard to riot-related intelligence records . The files destined for the shredders may be of the highest historical value and it is unacceptable that the Prime Minister and Home Minister should destroy them without a transparent vetting process by respected scholars. India's historical archive is not the private property of the RSS and Mr Modi. Scholars and intellectuals regardless of ideological persuasion need to protest aga...

When Mali's historic city was taken by rebels, thousands of priceless ancient manuscripts came under threat. We report on a dangerous operation to smuggle the archive to safety At 5am on a Sunday morning, Mohamed Diagayeté was disturbed by an urgent banging on the door of his house in Timbuktu, on the southern edge of the Sahara desert. It was a friend from the army: a heavily armed group of rebels had arrived at the city boundary, he told him; he'd done everything he could and must leave the city immediately. The soldier ran off to ditch his uniform and returned a few minutes later in civvies, intent on taking refuge in Diagayeté's house. Shortly afterwards, the first gunshots rang out over the city. "We could hear them firing. Bok! Bok! Bok," Diagayeté, an archivist, remembers. Before noon, a convoy of rebel pick-ups swept into the undefended town. So began the 10-month occupation of Timbuktu, first by Tuareg separatist rebels, then by their fellow-traveller...