Spunk Library

According to anarchist librarian Chuck Munson, the library was begun as Spunk Press in 1992."[http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=2008spain-interviews-chuck Alasbarricadas interviews Infoshop founder, Chuck Munson] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080223164754/http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=2008spain-interviews-chuck |date=2008-02-23 }}", Infoshop.org, 2008-02-20. The founding contributors – Ian Heavens, Jack Jansen, Andrew Flood, Iain McKay and Practical Anarchy editors Munson and Mikael Cardell – originally met via an online forum, namely Jansen's Anarchy Discussion email list. The Library was run by an editorial collective during the 1990s.

{{cite web

|url=http://www.spunk.org/manifest.html

|title=Spunk Library - Manifesto

|publisher=www.spunk.org

|access-date=2008-04-25

|archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20071118011354/http://www.spunk.org/manifest.html |archive-date = 2007-11-18}}

It was not intended to replace print publishing, but rather served a shop window promoting anarchist book publishers, newspapers and journals.{{cite book |last=Atton |first=Chris |title=Alternative Media |url=https://archive.org/details/alternativemedia0000atto |url-access=registration |publisher=Sage |location=Thousand Oaks |year=2002 |isbn=978-0-7619-6771-2 }}

By 1995, it was already the largest anarchist archive of published material catalogued on computer networks, though it faced a media assault accusing it of collaborating with terrorists such as the Red Army Faction, of providing instructions for bomb-making and of coordinating the “disruption of schools, looting of shops and attacks on multinational firms.”

{{cite journal

|url=http://www.greenleft.org.au/1995/190/11856

|title='Netwars': Politics and the Internet

|journal=Green Left

|access-date=2008-04-25

|date=1995-06-07

|last=Wehling

|first=Jason

}}

{{cite journal |last=Owens |first=Lynn |author2=L. Kendall Palmer |date=December 2003 |title=Making the News: Anarchist Counter-Public Relations on the World Wide Web |journal=Critical Studies in Media Communication |volume=20 |issue=4 |pages=335–361 |doi=10.1080/0739318032000142007 |citeseerx=10.1.1.530.1176 |s2cid=7783718 }} The Library remained largely inactive during the first decade of the 2000's, with the home page last being updated in March 2002.

{{cite web

|url=http://www.spunk.org/index.html

|title=Most recent Internet Archive snapshot of Spunk Library, 2008-05-02

|publisher=www.spunk.org

|access-date=2010-07-09

|archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20080502142724/http://www.spunk.org/index.html |archive-date = 2008-05-02}}

The Rough Guide to the Internet described the Library as being "organized neatly and with reassuring authority". Chris Atton, writing in Alternative Media (2002) hailed the site as an "advertisement for socially responsible anarchism with a significant intellectual pedigree", remarking that "[i]n a world where anarchism is still largely derided or maligned by the mass media, that is an important function" and drawing a comparison to Infoshop.org.

• Alternative Media Project
• Libcom.org, an online space that acts in part as a library and archive predominantly in english.
• Anarchy Archives, an online research center on the history and theory of anarchism founded in 1995
• List of anarchist periodicals

{{reflist|2}}

• [http://www.spunk.org/manifest.html Spunk library manifesto]

{{Anarchism}}

Category:Anarchist websites

Category:Internet properties established in 1992

Category:Online archives