October 6th, 2015

An update from the Anarchist Library: Fall 2015

Getting old? or just the weather...

Greetings from the labyrinths of the library. The anarchist library project has been aging slowly with time and brushing the dust off of its pages by forking out into new and exciting paths. The project now provides texts in eight different languages. The German and Swedish language libraries are the most recent additions. The project also offers libraries in the Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, Finnish, Russian, Spanish, and the English languages. As always, your participation in this project by helping upload and edit texts of interest to you is what helps make the archives wonderful.

Languages:

If you are interested in starting a new library in your native language (or one that you are highly fluent in), please contact us via email or by dropping by the IRC chat. We are willing to provide full support to help get your library project up and running.

Email: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/special/about

IRC: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/special/webchat (IRC etiquette means that we are not always there and often AFK IRL, so please have patience)

Social Media:

The library has also recently made a Twitter robot that automatically tweets out the newest editions and edits to the world. It's still in the beta stages, so please bear with it as a small foray into the world of robots and social media.

https://twitter.com/AnarchistLib

In other social media news, some of you may know that the library started a Facebook page years ago as well. It seems that this page, while generally disdained and neglected (and even hated) for some years by the librarians – has somehow become really popular. It now has almost 6,000 members in the public group (is this something to celebrate?). The page is meant as a tool for discussion and sharing of anarchist texts and not as a place for posting memes or heating up sectarian issues.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/262856644014/ (it's behind a wall and you must be logged in to view + added to group by mods)

Mirrors:

In place of having a torrent as we have done before in the past, friends have been kind enough to help provide a series of static website mirrors setup in case anything were to ever happen to the main servers. You can find them here:

http://mirror.anarhisticka-biblioteka.net/

http://mirror.anarhija.net

http://tal.bastardarchive.org/

http://tal.bolo-bolo.co/ (this mirror is beautiful, but not currently updated)

One is able to get the full batch of texts from the library a la the torrent by using tools for recursive downloading like wget for Linux, although we are unaware of any tools like this existing on Windoze.

How to help:

And on a closing note, the library is interested in searching out anarchist libraries IRL or AFK. While Infoshops are grand and play a vital role in the community, we are really looking for actual libraries or special collections that contain anarchist history. If you are aware of any anarchist special collections in the world please do let us know or help edit the wiki page on this subject (does a resource like this already exist?). It would be interesting information for those interested in research and finding lost gems in the anarchist canon on their travels.

https://bookshelf.theanarchistlibrary.org/library/librarian-anarchist-special-collections-en

Here is a 4 step crash course in how you can help the library as well-

http://bookshelf.theanarchistlibrary.org/library/teh-manual-for-revolutionary-librarians

The Libraries:

the Swedish library:

http://sv.theanarchistlibrary.org (93 texts)

the German library:

http://anarchistischebibliothek.org (268 texts)

the Spanish library:

http://es.theanarchistlibrary.org (403 texts) also on GNU Social:

https://gnusocial.net/biblioanarquista

the Serbo-Croatian library:

https://anarhisticka-biblioteka.net (400 texts)

the Macedonian library:

http://www.anarhisticka-biblioteka.org (119 texts)

the Finnish library:

http://fi.theanarchistlibrary.org (160 texts)

the Russian library:

http://ru.theanarchistlibrary.org (354 texts)

the English library:

https://theanarchistlibrary.org (2,436 texts)

October 4, 2014: a shiny new library

The library has been upgraded, with a couple of notable improvements:

• new mobile-friendly layout

• enhanced bookbuilder

• improved PDF style

The old files have been archived in a torrent release, which you can grab here: anarchist-libraries-2014-10-04.torrent.

The torrent ships the usual collection of ISO files, meant to be extracted or burned on a CD (for smaller libraries) or DVD and includes all the libraries (English, Spanish, Finnish, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian, Russian).

April 2014

A lightweight torrent (English only, HTML + sources) has been hacked together. You can grab it here: theanarchistlibrary-en-2014-04-25.torrent.

The torrent doesn’t come from the library, but from reti who wanted (and managed) to put it together. Thanks!

December 2013 update (2)

The bright side

• The libraries have got a new mobile-friendly adaptive layout. Feedback welcome.

• A technical tutorial about PDF compilation has been published at /special/recompile

The dark side

• Sorry, but it looks like we are not able to bring the torrent distribution up for various reasons. If you are a torrent lover and want to set it up, providing the initial seeding with a properly set up router (port forwarding) or from a seedbox, and you know what we are talking about, please get in touch.

• Sorry, but the network outages of the server are back again despite the work done. Please bookmark the mirrors below if you think you need the library always up.

December 2013 update

Since going live in 2009 with around 400 texts from different anarchist thinkers and their friends, the library of today now contains over 2,150 different titles. Recently, we have moved to a new server and updated some other aspects of the website. The Jabber chat server has closed and we have moved back to Internet Relay Chat (IRC). You can occasionally find us working over on the Freenode servers by pointing your preferred IRC client to:

server: chat.freenode.net

channel: #anarchistlibrary

more info: http://freenode.net/irc_servers.shtml

Feel free to drop by to discuss or help out with the project. One way to help the library is to take a look and see what is there. If you’re reading a text and come across some typos, you can help by fixing them. Perhaps you’re looking for a text by your favourite anarchist writer, but can’t find it on the library yet. Uploading new texts helps the library grow! It is important here to stress close attention to the guidelines and follow them (present a clean formatted text,etc).

Did you know that you can read the library in 6 different languages? Currently there are the English, Spanish, Serbo-Croatian, Finnish, Macedonian, and Russian libraries. Although, the Russian library is currently frozen and looking for new maintainers. There was also once a Hebrew library that never really took off. If you speak another language and are interested in starting a new library please contact us. It’s a lot of work and knowledge of computers is required, so serious offers only. We provide the code and space, you provide everything else.

If the library is ever down for some reason, you can also access the library via these mirrors (bookmark them, it could save your life):

• http://mirror.anarhisticka-biblioteka.net, kindly hosted by anarhija.org

• http://tal.bastardarchive.org, kindly hosted by Bastard Archive

• http://tal.bolo-bolo.co, kindly hosted by bolo-bolo.co

If you have the needed resources (about 4Gb of space and some bandwidth) and want to provide another mirror, feel free to contact us.

Some other interesting things to share about the project: Originally the website was built using the Drupal content management system (CMS), however soon was rebuilt using our homebrewed software, specifically designed to run a library. The code is freely available at https://gitorious.org/amuse-wiki

The libraries allow for the beautiful printing of texts that can be taken AFK and have been used in reading groups and shared with individuals all over. The English library has posted unreleased books and soon to be released books by authors like Bob Black’s “Nightmares of Reason” http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-nightmares-of-reason (2010) and more recently the first English language translations of Biófilo Panclasta http://theanarchistlibrary.org/authors/biofilo-panclasta (2013) to name a few.

It also contains many former hard to find anarchist texts like the recently published texts by Fredy Perlman http://theanarchistlibrary.org/authors/fredy-perlman and Black and Red Press http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/black-red-the-purpose-of-black-red. Other journals and articles have been grabbed from not only all over the Internet, but many have made their digital debut on the library, with the help of a scanner, opitical character recognition, and editing. For example, the archive contains over 80 articles from “Anarchy: Journal of Desire Armed” http://theanarchistlibrary.org/topics/ajoda dating from issue #23 up to #74, many of which were scanned and then uploaded for archival.

The library also contains a “book builder” feature that allows you to build a specific collection of texts and combine them into one, like a collection related to introducing anarchist thought. The wiki is still there and available for things like adding to the wish-list http://bookshelf.theanarchistlibrary.org/Wish%20list.