The Authorities Workshop

Why a workshop

AnarBib speaks to several audiences. The member libraries, who run their collections daily. The readers, who borrow and consult. The comrades who develop the code, translate the interfaces, proofread the documentation.

But there is a fourth circle, more dispersed: that of comrades attached to libertarian memory — through their reading, through their militant engagement, through their research work, through their curiosity — without being affiliated with a collective library. This circle has long been poorly received by institutional documentary tools: too specialised for public reading, not academic enough for research libraries, not connected enough to a physical collection for the militant libraries themselves.

The Authorities Workshop offers these comrades a place in the network: contributing to the care of libertarian memory by working on the shared bibliographic layer — what in documentary jargon is called authorities.

What we call authorities

In a library, every book, brochure, periodical, flyer, zine, audio resource, audiovisual or digital, is the subject of a record. The record describes the object: title, date of edition, place, etc.

So that several records can coherently refer to the same thing — the same person, the same collectivity, the same subject — what are called authority records are built alongside. An authority record is the precise and stabilised description of a person (Errico Malatesta, Voltairine de Cleyre, He Zhen), a collectivity (the Jura Federation, the journal Mother Earth, the Libertarian Athenaeum of Bordeaux), or a subject concept (mutualism, antimilitarism, the general strike).

When a book by Malatesta is catalogued, its record does not contain a string of characters "Errico Malatesta" typed manually by the librarian; it contains a link to the authority record "Malatesta, Errico (1853-1932)". This link allows all the records that mention Malatesta — from the BLMF in Belém to the CIRA in Lausanne, from the private collection of a comrade to the catalogue of a militant magazine — to point to the same authority, and therefore be searchable together.

Authority work is precision work. It is also a discreet political act: institutional ILSs have historically poorly documented the comrades of the libertarian movement — false dates, mixed-up pseudonyms, erroneous attributions, pure and simple omissions of the comrades who had no access to the printing press. To make correct libertarian authorities is to do justice to past comrades whom official historiography has often erased.

What work, concretely

Once the workshop is open, here are the types of tasks a contributor will be able to take, at their own rhythm.

Create missing authority records. When the network has many records mentioning a comrade of the past without a record dedicated to them, the workshop proposes one: reference name, dates, known pseudonyms, sourced short biography, links to Wikidata / VIAF / other repertoires.

Enrich existing records. A record may exist but be incomplete: missing dates, no bibliography of works, no multilingual biography, undocumented sources. Everything is improvable.

Merge or disambiguate. Two records describing the same person (duplicates) must be merged. A record erroneously grouping two distinct persons must be split. This work requires particular attention.

Source. A claim made in a record ("born on 14 December 1853 in Santa Maria Capua Vetere") must be backed by a verifiable source. The workshop ensures that every claim is traceable.

Translate. Short authority biographies may exist in several languages. A comrade who speaks two languages can translate a record from one language to another.

And beyond person authorities, the workshop will also work on collectivity authorities (groups, journals, publishing houses, federations) and subject authorities (concepts, movements, events). It is a vast project that far exceeds the strength of a single library, and that justifies pooling efforts.

How it will work

Proposals rather than direct editing

The workshop does not give access to direct editing of the network's authority database. Instead, the contributor proposes a creation, a modification, a merger. A member library of the network (or the workshop coordination) examines the proposal and validates it. It is a little slower, but it avoids drift, allows inexperienced comrades to contribute without risk, and maintains a documentary dialogue between the workshop and the libraries that use the records.

A contributor account

To join the workshop, one creates an account on AnarBib that is not affiliated with a member library — it is a global network account, dedicated to contribution. This account gives access to the workshop's task queues, a personal dashboard, and a journal of validated contributions.

A task dashboard

Rather than asking comrades to look for what to do, the workshop proposes tasks: authorities to create, records to enrich, duplicates to examine, translations to do. Each one takes what interests them, at their own rhythm, without commitment.

Learning by practice

Working on authorities is something that is learned. When to create a person authority rather than a collectivity authority? How to handle pseudonyms? How to source a contested date? The workshop will have a mini-documentation and typical examples, but also — and especially — an ongoing dialogue with the librarians of the member libraries, who are the primary recipients of the work. This back-and-forth is what trains.

Horizontal governance of contentious cases

When two comrades disagree on an authority — should a record be created for this person? what is their reference name? is this information sufficiently sourced? — the decision goes through discussion among concerned comrades and using libraries, with consensus as principle. No vote, no hierarchical authority deciding in place of the collective.

The spirit

The image that guides this project is that of the watchmakers of the Jura Federation at the end of the 19th century. Comrades dispersed in Swiss valleys, who worked alone or in small groups, but who connected in federation without hierarchy. It is in this ecosystem that Kropotkin, in 1872, found the definitive decentring that made him tip into anarchism.

The Authorities Workshop would like to function this way: each at their workbench, in their valley, on their record, but connected to others through a flexible network, without a boss, without hierarchy, with the common care for work well done in service of a collective memory.

Status of the project

The Authorities Workshop is, at this hour, an announcement of intention and not an open functionality. The necessary technical module (contributor interface, proposal queue, task dashboard, dispute governance) will be developed in the next phase of the project, after the stabilisation of the cataloguing module that is currently in consolidation (see the progress page).

This page exists to announce the orientation, gather opinions and interest, and allow comrades who recognise themselves in this approach to make themselves known from now on — so that we can contact them when the workshop actually opens.

Are you interested?

Write to contato@anarbib.org with the subject "Authorities Workshop". Tell us briefly what interests you, your languages, your preferred fields if any (historical figures, specific currents, geographies, periods). We keep an informal list of comrades who have made themselves known, which we will pick up when the workshop opens concretely.

No commitment, no technical skill required to signal your interest. The skill required eventually will be that of attentive reading, sense of the collective, and documentary patience — not that of code or computer science.

To discuss directly without commitment, the project's Matrix room is open: #anarbib:matrix.org.