Hi everyone,
The time has come to announce that the ATAR Library will be closing at the end of this year and will not continue in 2025. We've had a great run and I am extremely grateful for the positive reception this site has had and for all the support we've received. It's been a pleasure operating the site and connecting with so many people in this space from students and teachers to both authors and publishers.
I have mentioned in the past that this site's closure would only ever be on my own terms, not under pressure from any legal threats, and this remains true. I have received dozens of copyright/DMCA complaints, legal threats and insults. My reason for the site's retirement is just out of a desire to move on and pursue other things.
It may not look like a lot of work from the surface, but the time commitment of operating this site is enormous. We do everything as volunteers including: server administration, sorting and redacting new files for upload, writing custom scripts to download from proprietary platforms (e.g. Campion, Cambridge GO, Oxford Digital, Edrolo), writing emails (especially in response to copyright complaints), seeking new resources, among many other things. While I enjoy volunteering, it's just not sustainable and it's time for me to move on. The site is expensive to host but by far the largest sacrifice I make is my time.
I am very hopeful that someone else will take on the role of hosting a new library, even if it's just at a much smaller scale. While I won't work on this site anymore, I'll stick around for a little bit longer to provide advice to anyone else who may be developing a new library. I've learnt a lot in this time, particularly how to redact and manipulate PDFs as the PDF format is not well documented.
We manually remove the hidden text from every textbook uploaded to this site. If VCAA practiced the same opsec as us for their exams, the leaked question data would never have been exposed.
Since the site's inception, I have received many copyright complaints from authors to company directors. Where possible, I communicate with the complainant and negotiate the removal of resources if I believe it is appropriate. The logic I follow is that if the harm to authors is greater than the potential benefit to students, the resource should not be public. I keep this in mind when uploading resources and try to never upload anything created by independent authors. For transparency, I have included a few interactions below that I think have value being public. Names have been redacted.
Below is a debate between myself and an author on the ethics of this site. I highly encourage anyone considering creating a successor to this site to read this conversation in full and decide for yourself where you stand based on the arguments provided by each side. While I believe hosting this site has been a net positive, there are a huge amount of factors to consider to reduce harm.
Putting the negatives aside, the benefit of the library has been incredible and I am so grateful for everyone who has expressed how the site has helped them.
Thank you everyone for supporting the site's mission and for all the help you've provided in growing the library. Much love to all contributors and volunteers ♥
Make sure to check out the awesome work being done by others to support students:
Stay gold,
Your friends at atar.rocks :)
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