Duane dot Rousselle at unb dot ca
Draft PR for Reverse Citation Search Function
The Anarchist Library: New Reverse Citation Feature
The Anarchist Library is a home for over 1370 digital anarchist texts. As far as we know, it is the largest digital collection of anarchist texts in the world. This is an incredible accomplishment because each text passes through the hands of at least two of our librarian staff members who then carefully read and edit it to ensure that it correctly passes through our scripts. Our plan has always been to go “slow-and-steady” and to use our own resources rather than a university’s or corporation’s (we have never even asked for donations!). Finally, we share our code, our resources, and our tools in order to promote similar achievements across the internet.
Surprisingly, we have achieved all of this without implementing any decision-making structure. We trust in each other’s decisions and feel comfortable dealing with problems as they arise rather than formalizing them. The Anarchist Library is not just an archive of anarchist texts – it is also an example of anarchism in practice! For this reason, we believe that the scholarly community will never be able to produce a project of similar value: anarchism works better.
At yet, there are scholarly ideas that have proved important to the development of the library. Over the last few months we have been working hard to integrate robust search functionality on our website. We are proud to announce a new search feature for our website: Reverse Citation Searching. The role of the reverse citation search is to search elements of a source text within and across all texts in our library. Optimally, the search results should show which texts cited the source text after its publication date. Traditionally, scholars found the reverse citation search helped them to grasp the extent to which their work was important (they believed that there was a linear relationship between the number of times their work has been cited and the contribution they have made to "knowledge"). We believe, to some extent, that, within the anarchist tradition, this search may help to provide some idea of the influence of key anarchist writers. It also assists researchers in finding the genealogy of an idea (reverse searching Kropotkin’s “Mutual Aid”, for example, provides an interesting lineage of ideas and demonstrates how Kropotkin’s work has been adopted by other anarchists throughout time). This makes it far easier for anarchist researchers to do the work they do.
We encourage you to test this new feature and to report your results to us. Step 1: Locate the “source” text that you would like to reverse search. Step 2: Click on the “Who Cited This?” link in the upper meta-data. You will be transported to our custom reverse search page. All of the source fields will be automatically populated with data from the source text. Please read the instructions carefully and adjust the source fields as needed. You may further refine the search by adding search terms into the lower “destination” fields. Step 3: Browse the search results and write that award-winning paper!
If you notice any problems please email us at TheAnarchistLibrary@AngryNerds.com. You may also join us on irc.anarchyplanet.org (port 6697, SSL only).