Date: Mon, 07 Oct 2002 12:20:58 -0400
From: shawn wilbur <swilbur-AT-wcnet.org>
Subject: libertarian microfiche project


I've spent part of the last few days working with a batch of microfiche
i ordered from John Zube's Libertarian Microfiche Publishing project
<http://www.acenet.com.au/~jzube/>. I'm pretty impressed. John has
scanned about 1600 fiche, with up to 450 pages per fiche, of anarchist
and libertarian material, and offers them for about US$1.00 each.
There's lots of stuff in the catalog of the austro-libertarian or
"anarcho"-capitalist variety, but there's also large amounts of more
appealing stuff. I picked up full reprints of Benjamin Tucker's "Radical
Review" and "Liberty," Lysander Spooner's "Collected Works," misc
writings by Jo and Laurance Labadie, issues of "The Dandelion" with
various reprints including Josiah Warren's scarce-as-hen's-teeth
"Manifesto," and a few other items. The batch cost me US$63.00 postpaid.

The image quality is generally high. The viewer i used at the bookstore
for distributor inventory fiches isn't quite up to the magnification
chores, but it was never very good anyway. Better readers are available
used online for less than US$50. Modern printing viewers are available
used starting at about US$500. And i just took mine over to the local
university library and used the viewer/printers there.

Microfiche is in some ways less desirable as a medium for archiving than
CDROMs, but it's hard to argue with the deal LMP is offering. This sort
of archiving puts a large amount of anarchist material otherwise limited
to expensive library editions or rare, fragile original publications
within the price reach of even a small infoshop or individual. In terms
of usability, searchable text, like that available in the Spunk Library
and similar sites, has distinct advantages, but if folks could work at
getting image scans of anarchist and libertarian material in some
portable form, the transcription work could go on much more easily. I
think this has convinced me to shift my efforts from pamphlets and web
archives to CDROM in the future. I'm realizing that i could have had a
whole lot more material accessible in the time i've spent doing minor
transcription work.

There are apparently a number of other generally libertarian archiving
projects out there. www.butterbach.net lists a bunch of them.

-shawn