What's been done, so far?

This project started 2 years ago and it went live after a couple of months. It began with about 400 texts, mostly classics. If printed out, the whole archive would have had about 15,000 pages. Some months later, on October 23, 2009, the first torrent was released. It had 600 texts, including as always, whole books and individual short, medium and long articles and essays, with 23,000 virtual pages.

In March 2010, the second torrent was released. 973 texts, with about 30,000 pages. Due to a error (too many files in the torrent), the release went almost unnoticed, as the various search engines simply collapsed under the load while scanning the .torrent file. This past October 2010, the third torrent came out: 1133 texts, 36,000 pages, but with a new PDF design. The tracker reported about 600 completed downloads.

Currently the library encompasses around 1370 texts (or about 42,000 virtual pages). We will release another torrent over the next few months (or when we reach the 1500 milestone). Most of the texts in our archive originally come from other internet pages. They are cleaned up, fixed as much as possible, reformatted and published in what we believe to be a much cleaner and more accurate format than they originally appeared. In the beginning the HTML pages were being served to readers by a ready-made Content Management System (Drupal). Now they are static pages generated by a set of home-made programs. The PDF generator has been changed a couple of times, from LaTeX to XeTeX and finally to ConTeXt, using advanced techniques such as microtypography to give you the very best quality.

What is the problem?

There are only a few people who upload stuff. They do wonderful work, but the lack of diverse (anarchist) perspectives creates the feeling that the archive is moving toward a single vision/sensibility. This is not really a problem, but if you want to upload a text you consider important please do it and try to communicate with us by 1.) leaving a note in the "leave a message to librarians" section of your upload page, and/or 2.) come to the #library IRC channel. Strangely enough, we are real people (not machines).

About scanning and OCR

zinelibrary.info is doing an impressive service. However, most of the texts uploaded there are just scans without the optical character recognition (OCR) of the text. This means that the library can not import it. Basically, OCR is the process of turning an image into real computer-readable text. Lately we have been receiving some freshly scanned and OCR'ed texts, which is great! Also, extracting text from the PDF is something that can be difficult and time consuming, but it really helps out so much! Really. Yes, we love our own PDFs, but we provide their *source* which makes it easier for others to remix them. This is what the free software community has been doing for decades and we want to encourage this practice within anarchist communities as well. In this way, we can work toward a disruption of the compulsion toward the commodification of anarchist knowledge.

Texts are not getting fixed

Everyone can (and should) fix the typos and the OCR errors found in the texts. While it is the intent to provide the highest quality texts, sometimes errors make it through. It is for this reason that the library makes it possible to "Edit" the text and resubmit it. Unfortunately, this seldom happens. Please, we can not stress this enough - help us fix these errors. The "Edit" button is located on the black bar for each entry.

What does this archive have more of than others?

We do not have a forum. We do not have "social bookmarks". So it looks like there is no fun to be had here. However, an under-used wiki exists for precisely this purpose. The IRC channel, although with just a few people, is alive and the preferred way to get in contact. There is a link to the wiki page in the black menu bar beneath our header image.

We ship the texts in a form which is suitable for long term archiving. In its source format (a subset of HTML), the archive is consistent: this means that the whole archive can be easily parsed by ad-hoc programs to create new output formats (so far HTML, PDF, epub, TeX).

The focus is on the reading and on the printing; our focus is not on giving place to (virtual) discussions. There are plenty of other places for that.

Why printing?

Reading on computer screen is not something pleasant. Even if we ship the EPUB format for mobile devices, it's still a tech/geek niche. Print, fold, read (don't forget to fix the typos you found) and share. It's mainly about *sharing* texts which are meant to make people *think* and *act*. So, a little call follows.

Call for feedback

Thanks to the way the library has been built, adding/changing PDF formats is trivial. Every photocopy service will be pleased to print out and bind even large books found on the library. Or, better, you can do it yourself. But we can't know everything that you need. Is the format suitable for you? Would you like to have increased inner margins of the imposed version? Would you like to have another imposing schema? Did the printer spit you in the face when you brought her/him the file? What does s/he need?

So, please contact us and let us know. We will find a solution. If there are no objections/suggestions then the following changes are coming soon:

No more flat A4/letter. Hard to read on screen, paper wasted if printed. Instead:

Updates-2011-02-01 (last edited 2011-02-05 02:12:57 by enkidu)