Progress in archiving Liberty

There are a certain number of volumes in almost every major library collection, with titles like “Philosophical Pamphlets,” or something equally vague, which contain collections of materials bound together, with more or less rhyme or reason. The digital collections, of course, have them too, though frequently with even less in the way of contextual material or metadata to identify them and their contents. Once in a while those volumes turn out to be gold mines. This weekend, while searching at the Internet Archive site (one of those before-I-log-out searches, a stab in the dark, because I hadn’t done it in […]

Before I had seriously begun my 2006 archiving push, John Zube mentioned the work of a French archivist, Vincent Dubuc, who had taken on a large-scale digitizing project. It was one of the encouragements to set a target and begin a regular scanning routine. Thanks to the attention that the Liberty archive has been getting (new thank-you‘s to Ken MacLeod and the Anarchism Community on LiveJournal for recent traffic), Vincent got in touch. His site, La Presse Anarchiste, is well worth some browsing time. Regular readers may be particularly interested in E. Armand’s papers, L’Ère nouvelle and L’Unique, but there […]

[Ah, for the settled life of a scholar, where I could tackle my 1.104 issues of Liberty each day, and keep a regular schedule, rather than the constant fire-fighting and scrambling that goes with part-timing. But the show must go on, however fitfully.] So what actually appears in the pages of Liberty? The staple, stable source for Tucker’s opinions remained, from first to last, the “On Picket Duty” column. From the first issue, of August 6, through the remainder of 1881, this occupied the first two columns on the front page of nearly every issue, while a collection of clippings […]