I’ve decided, in the interest of going easy on my readers here, and on various feeds and aggregators where this blog is now available (such as the new leftlibertarian.org site), to limit the number of full texts I post. I feel like there is sufficient “market” for the texts in the blogosphere to keep posting them somewhere where they can easily be accessed via an RSS feed, and through Technorati and other search services. But I would like to make this blog and Travelling in Liberty leaner and more readable than they have been. In order to make that happen, In the Libertarian Labyrinth now has a sister blog, From the Libertarian Library, which will function primarily as a text-dump. Full books, full journal issues, misc. texts I want to reference on this or other blogs—the new blog will be a catch-all for all that stuff. It will also function as the first stage of my own editing queue.
Scanned or transcribed works will get a basic proofreading, be posted to From the Libertarian Library, where they will be accessible and relatively accurate. Eventually, all those works will find a more permanent home, either in the Libertarian Labyrinth archive or in some form of print publication, book or pamphlet. I’m wrestling with my own thoughts about archive encoding formats at the moment, so in the short term, development of the main archive site will probably consist of bibliographic and indexing works, with either XHTMLization and/or TEI-ization of key works as a secondary concern. I am currently unable to do very close editing of many of the texts I’m uploading anyway, although I would guess I’m still exceeding the industry standard for full-text archives in most cases.
The first additions to the new blog are from William Henry Van Ornum, who was initially a single-tax radical, but became an anarchist. He was a friend of the Westrups, a regular contributor to The Twentieth Century, and the author of several books. Why Government at All? (Chicago: Charles Kerr, 1892), was probably his most significant work, and it is one I started to transcribe ten years ago. I’ve posted all of “Part One” of that work:
Shawn, thinking about digital library management, I remembered a program I messed around with a couple of years ago that might be useful to you. It’s called Greenstone, and it might be right up your alley. It’s cool for building online libraries, and what’s even better, it makes it very simple to make a cd with full search capabilities. It’s worth a look if you haven’t seen it already.
I just realized that I might have already mentioned it to you a year or so ago, and if so, never mind.