AnarBib — A library system for anarchist libraries
AnarBib is a free cataloguing, lending and collective-memory tool, built by and for militant libraries. It was born at the Biblioteca Libertária Maxwell Ferreira, affiliated with the Centro de Cultura Libertária da Amazônia in Belém do Pará (Brazil), to meet the concrete needs of a library under rudimentary conditions — with no financial resources and limited human resources: cataloguing, indexing, loans, reservations, maintaining the collections. It grew taking into account the discussions within the FICEDL between 2023 and 2024.
Unlike institutional library management systems, AnarBib starts from political requirements: data minimisation (loan history is a map of militant readings), free classification with no mandatory Dewey, accessibility for non-specialists, militant multilingualism (ten languages), a free AGPL licence and the possibility of self-hosting it or hosting it among allies. The code is on Codeberg.
The workshop will be presented by the coordinator of the Biblioteca Libertária Maxwell Ferreira.