Digital libraries

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February 2025 Unsealed internal emails in a lawsuit against Meta revealed that the company had downloaded over 81 terabytes of data through Anna's Archive torrents.
January 2025 Telegram suspended Anna's Archive's channel and messaging app access due to copyright infringement, without prior warning. In the same week, Z-Library's Telegram channel was also suspended.
2024
Arkiv Digital
Family Tree Magazine listed Arkiv Digital as one of the world's top 101 websites for genealogists, continuing a recognition the company has received for over a decade.
2024
Arkiv Digital
Published a further expanded edition of Håkan Skogsjö's handbook 'Släktforskning på riktigt'.
2024 Anna's Archive was again listed in the Notorious Markets List by the United States Trade Representative. The Association of American Publishers identified it as an infringing site and analyzed its cryptocurrency wallets, finding a total of $29,596.21 in received funds.
December 2024 The majority of Library Genesis domains are seized or disabled through legal action by a group of publishers led by Pearson Education. The German consortium (CUII) also institutes a country-wide blocking order against Library Genesis without court authorization.
December 2024 Publishers successfully seized the 'library.lol' domain and took most Library Genesis domains offline.
December 2024 The UK Publishers Association successfully obtained a High Court of Justice order requiring major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block Anna's Archive and other copyright-infringing websites, as part of ongoing efforts to protect copyrighted materials under section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act.
September 26 2024 A US judge ordered LibGen to pay the publishers US$30 million, despite uncertainty about who operates the platform.
July 2024 Following the OCLC lawsuit, Anna's Archive replaced its .org mirror with a .gs mirror to avoid US jurisdiction. Shortly after, the .gs domain was suspended, and the site reverted to the original .org domain.
March 2024 The Rotterdam District Court issued a blocking order against Anna's Archive and Library Genesis, requiring major internet service providers in the Netherlands to block these sites following a request by anti-piracy group BREIN. The order was 'dynamic', allowing for blocking of future domain or IP address changes.
March 2024 A group of authors filed a lawsuit against Nvidia in a California federal court, alleging that the company trained its NeMo AI platform using the Books3 dataset, which includes copyrighted data from Anna's Archive.
March 23 2024 The Dutch pirate site blocklist added Library Genesis and Anna's Archive following a request by BREIN, a local anti-piracy group, further restricting the platform's availability.
March 1 2024 Publishers requested a default judgment and an injunction to compel gateway providers IPFS, Pinata Technologies, and Cloudflare to deny services to Library Genesis.
January 2024 OCLC filed a lawsuit against Anna's Archive in an Ohio federal court, claiming the WorldCat scrape was achieved through cyberattacks and seeking over $5 million in damages and an injunction.
January 2024 Italy's national communications agency ordered Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block Anna's Archive following a copyright complaint by the Italian Publishers Association. The Digital Services Directorate investigated the site and confirmed the presence of copyrighted material, identifying that some servers were likely owned by a Ukrainian hosting provider.
2023
Arkiv Digital
Arkiv Digital initiated research into using AI technology to transcribe older handwritten texts, addressing challenges faced by younger generations in reading historical handwritten documents from the 1900s.
2023
Arkiv Digital
Released an expanded edition of the English handbook 'Explore your Swedish heritage'.
2023 Anna's Archive was first included in the Notorious Markets List by the United States Trade Representative, identifying the site as potentially engaging in large-scale copyright infringement.
December 31 2023
Arkiv Digital
Arkiv Digital reached a milestone of 262.3 million total index entries across various historical record collections.
December 31 2023
Arkiv Digital
Arkiv Digital reached nearly 97 million color images in its database of historical documents, covering extensive archival collections across Sweden.
October 2023 Anna's Archive scraped the entirety of WorldCat, the world's largest bibliographic database, making its proprietary data freely available. Anna described this as 'a major milestone in mapping out all the books in the world'.
September 14 2023 Pearson Education, McGraw Hill Education, Macmillan Publishers, and Cengage Group initiated a copyright infringement lawsuit against Library Genesis in the Southern District of New York.
November 2022 Following US law enforcement's seizure of Z-Library domains and arrest of its alleged operators, Anna (Anna Archivist) launched Anna's Archive, initially displaying results from Z-Library and Library Genesis.
September 2022 Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi) project successfully completed a full mirror copy of Z-Library, acknowledging deliberate copyright law violations in most countries.
2021
Arkiv Digital
Released the acquired aerial photographs, organized by map locations.
2021
Arkiv Digital
Published an expanded edition of Håkan Skogsjö's handbook 'Släktforskning på riktigt'.
2020
Arkiv Digital
Released an English version of the handbook titled 'Explore your Swedish heritage' for English-speaking researchers.
2020
Arkiv Digital
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Arkiv Digital was forced to limit archival material photography and instead focused on expanding name indexes and improving the user interface.
2020 The Library Genesis project is forked under a new domain 'libgen.fun' due to internal project conflicts.
2020 The project launched a peer-to-peer digital library of content using IPFS, expanding Library Genesis and Sci-Hub's digital archiving capabilities.
2019
Arkiv Digital
Arkiv Digital published Håkan Skogsjö's handbook 'Släktforskning på riktigt' for genealogical research.
2019 Archivists and freedom of information activists launched a project to improve seeding and hosting of LibGen's data dumps, with project coordinator 'shrine' describing it as creating a 'permanent library card for the world'.
November 2019
Arkiv Digital
Arkiv Digital launched a new feature enabling users to create cloud-based family trees, which can be built manually or by uploading a GEDCOM file. This feature allows subscribers to directly connect their genealogical research with the company's digitized historical records and name index entries.
November 2018 Library Genesis was blocked by Russian internet service providers, marking a significant legal challenge to the platform's accessibility in Russia.
February 1 2018
Arkiv Digital
The SVAR platform became a free, tax-funded service renamed 'Digital Research Room', becoming a strong competitor to Arkiv Digital.
2016
Arkiv Digital
The company initiated collaborations with genealogy associations to create searchable name indexes for all of Sweden's birth, marriage, and death records.
2016
Arkiv Digital
Arkiv Digital launched name indexes for the Census of Sweden for 1950 and 1960, and The Swedish Population records for 1880–1920.
2016
Arkiv Digital
Arkiv Digital began launching large-scale name indexes to historical records, initiating a comprehensive digitization project of Swedish historical documentation.
2016
Arkiv Digital
Acquired several million older aerial photographs from Svenska Aero-Bilder AB, depicting farms and houses across Sweden from the 1950s onward.
2015
Arkiv Digital
Received the Dagens Industri 'Gasellpriset' (Gazelle Award) for rapid and profitable growth.
2015
Arkiv Digital
Introduced the 'order photography' service, allowing users to pay for specific volumes to be digitized and added to the image database.
October 2015 District Court for the Southern District of New York ordered LibGen to shut down and suspend use of the libgen.org domain, though the site remained accessible through alternative domains.
June 18 2015 District Court for the Southern District of New York allowed Elsevier to serve notice on the defendants by email.
June 3 2015 Elsevier lawsuit initiated against Library Genesis and Alexandra Elbakyan, accusing them of operating an international network of piracy and copyright infringement.
2014
Arkiv Digital
Arkiv Digital identified a trend among younger users preferring easy searchability, leading to a strategic decision to create name indexes for historical records.
2014
Arkiv Digital
Received the Dagens Industri 'Gasellpriset' (Gazelle Award) for rapid and profitable growth.
2014
Arkiv Digital
The company started adding new features to compete with the SVAR platform.
2014 LibGen's catalog grows to more than 1.2 million records, which is over twice the size of the previous library.nu collection.
2014 Sci-Hub relied on Library Genesis for storage of research papers and books until the end of this year, using LibGen as a primary source for accessing and serving academic documents.

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This contents of the box above is based on material from the Wikipedia articles Arkiv Digital, Library Genesis & Anna's Archive, which are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.