The AnarBib project

What we do

AnarBib is an integrated library management system (ILS) — that is, the software that allows a library to organise its collection, catalogue its documents, manage loans, welcome readers, cooperate with other libraries. What ILSs of the market make expensive, surveil silently, and impose in terms foreign to our practices, AnarBib does freely, openly, and with our own categories.

The project is currently used by a small circle of pilot libraries, mainly in Brazil and France. It is meant to expand over time to other anarchist libraries of the world, by successive adhesions to the network.

Where it comes from

AnarBib was born from a shared observation: no existing tool is truly suited to militant libraries. Proprietary ILSs (Koha hosted, BiblioCommons, Ex Libris) are designed for funded institutions, with budgets, support contracts, audit logics. They poorly describe our collections — a self-published flyer, a zine, a campaign pamphlet, a militant archive folder don't fit into the planned boxes. They treat readers as data to be exploited. They lock records into proprietary silos. And their economic logic stands in direct contradiction with anarchist values: payment, subscription, commercial dependence.

Existing free ILSs (Koha self-hosted, PMB) are better from an ethical standpoint, but designed for university or municipal libraries. They are heavy to install, complex to configure, and their documentary model is not ours.

AnarBib fills this gap: a free, gratis, multilingual software, conceived from our practices, for our collections, at our scale.

What distinguishes it politically

AnarBib is not only a technical tool. It is a stance taken at several levels.

Local sovereignty. Each member library remains fully in charge of its collection, its rules, its readers, its visual identity. No central coordination can impose an internal choice. This differs radically from hosted ILSs where the operator dictates the technical rules and limits the autonomy of libraries.

Horizontal cooperation. The libraries of the network exchange bibliographic records, loans, skills. This multiplies the work of each one without hierarchy. A record catalogued in Belém is immediately reusable in Dunkirk, and vice versa. The network coordinators are comrades, not authorities.

Refusal of data commodification. No reading behaviour statistic is collected. No algorithmic recommendation engine. No data resale. Readers' information remains in their library, can be deleted on request, and never leaves the network.

Real gratuity. No subscription, no premium version, no withheld feature for paying users. The code is under free licence, readable and modifiable by anyone with the desire or competence.

Multilingualism by design. The project is carried in Brazilian Portuguese first, then translated. French, Castilian, English, Italian, German, Catalan and Esperanto are available. Other languages (Basque, Swiss German, Polish, Turkish…) can be added on request, by volunteer translators. No language has technical primacy over the others.

What it does concretely

For readers, AnarBib offers:

• a search in the catalogue of one library or several, without needing an account;
• the possibility to reserve a loan, request an on-site consultation, follow current loans, renew, manage a wishlist;
• a personal account hosted with the local library, with its own rules (loan durations, pickup arrangements), not in a centralised platform.

For librarians, AnarBib offers:

• a dashboard that generates the day's work (reservations to handle, expected returns, overdues, planned pickups);
• a cataloguing interface at two levels — simple mode by default, full mode for experts — adapted to militant collections (books, brochures, periodicals, flyers, audio, audiovisual, digital resources, dossiers, zines, archives);
• circulation management (loans, returns, renewals, account restrictions);
• printing of shelfmark labels, inventory tracking, email communications to readers;
• configurable visual identity for each library (colours, fonts, images, welcome message) without touching the code.

For the network, and progressively:

• sharing of bibliographic records produced locally, so that other libraries can reuse them;
• imports from other libertarian libraries, archives, partner publishers (in opening);
• temporary inter-library loans and definitive exchanges of surplus documents (in preparation).

How it is technically made

AnarBib is a web application. The frontend is in React (with Vite). The backend rests on Supabase, a free platform built on top of PostgreSQL, which provides the database, authentication, file storage, and Edge functions. The source code is public on Codeberg, under free licence.

The application is served from Codeberg Pages — a militant, non-profit infrastructure. The very site you are reading is hosted there too. No AWS, no analytics, no tracker. One single assumed exception to this self-hosting doctrine: the login page uses Cloudflare Turnstile, an anti-bruteforce protection that activates only at this entry point and does not track navigation. The rest of the journey has no Cloudflare dependency.

For libraries that want to join the network, two formulas are possible: an instance hosted by the network (recommended to start, no technical skill required) or an autonomous installation on the library's own infrastructure (for technically equipped comrades).

The tool and the work

AnarBib does not replace the work of libraries. It equips it.

An anarchist militant library lives by the patient and political work of its comrades: choosing what enters the collection, reading the works before cataloguing them, understanding what is being described, welcoming readers with the time it takes, keeping a place alive, debating acquisition choices, transmitting militant memory from generation to generation. No software does that in your place.

Cataloguing in particular is the heart of the craft. Deciding that a work is a book rather than a brochure, attributing a person authority rather than a collectivity authority, choosing the subjects that will describe a collection, hierarchising descriptions — these are political and library-science acts that demand time, reading, competence, and a collective dialogue within each library.

AnarBib makes this work easier: adapted interface, forms thought for militant collections, sharing of records between libraries to avoid redoing what is already done elsewhere. But the underlying work remains local, militant, and slow. A library that does not want to do this work does not need AnarBib — it needs to put back at the centre the political question of what cataloguing means.

How it is governed

AnarBib has no central body. There is no formal association, no board, no administrative council. The project lives by two complementary sets: the common texts that set the framework, and the human circles that make the project run on a daily basis.

The common texts

Two short texts suffice for the framework:

• the minimal charter that each member library recognises on entry — ten short articles that set the common principles;
• the welcoming practices that describe how the network concretely welcomes a new candidate library.

These two texts are versioned publicly and evolve through discussion, without any authority imposing them unilaterally.

The four human circles

Four circles bring the project to life, distinct but connected.

Member libraries. They run their collection daily, welcome their readers, catalogue their documents, welcome new candidates by consensus. This is the operational heart of the network.

Readers. Affiliated to a member library, they borrow, consult on site, reserve, follow their loans. They are the primary recipients of the libraries' work.

Project maintainers. They make the code evolve, the documentation, the translations, the technical infrastructure. The work is done through discussion and consensus among comrades, without formal hierarchy. The sponsoring libraries who accompany each new library candidate to membership are a specific declination of this circle.

The Authorities Workshop. A fourth circle, more dispersed: that of comrades who are not affiliated with any library but who contribute to the care of libertarian memory by working on the shared bibliographic layer of the network (person, collectivity, subject authorities). It is a workplace open to isolated comrades, currently being set up.

These four circles are not hierarchised. They have different temporalities, different competences, different commitments. The project only holds together because they exist together.