This is a new website for collecting together stories of lives lived in unconventional ways. Which could mean something as simple as what it’s like to live on a narrow boat. Or it could mean someone hitchhiking round the world because it was the only way they knew how to process a tough childhood with their sanity intact.

On the discussion spaces for the website you can find help with for example tracking down items in university special collections or help with how to write stories from your own life into essays and books that could go up on the website.

The website works just like wikipedia, where anyone can submit new texts to the website and new edits of texts currently on the website.

Which texts go up on the website is decided by a small collective of librarians, but all decisions will be put to a debate that anyone can join, in the live chat discussion spaces linked below.

Discussion Spaces

On the discord and matrix live chat spaces you’ll get:

• Updates on when new texts go live.

• Help with how to request rare documents from university archives.

• The chance to co-ordinate with others on copy typing up handwritten documents onto the website.

• The option to debate what new texts go up on the website.

Ethical steps taken by this project

Anyone can join the debate on discord and matrix over the creation of new pages and how texts should be edited, obviously if you join just to troll or spam though, you will be removed.

A record will be kept of all texts that were rejected, whether for minor formatting reasons or deeply held political reasons.

A record will also be kept of controversial texts that were approved, where for example there was a sizable disagreement.

Frequently asked questions

How easy was the website to set up?

We just bought the domain then asked the good folks at Anarchist Libraries.net to set up the Amuse Wiki software. They did it all for us for free, had it running virtually right away and have helped answer any questions.

If you're curious to live chat to them, there's a channel on the Hexchat program under Libera.Chat channels #amusewiki and #anarchistlibrary.

If you'd like to set up your own anarchist library you can attempt to follow the steps described here and/or email anarchistlibraries-request@inventati.org.